Latest Use for Spyware: Inflating Traffic Totals

Adware and malware are not just for hijacking sales anymore, it can help you sell a web property as well. Not directly, of course, but in traffic statistics and the number of unique visitors your website gets. It’s still all about the visitors, I don’t care what people tell you about the page view being dead, there are too many advertising companies that use the easily inflated Alexa rankings as a basis for how much they will pay you to advertise on your site. So, it’s simple. Start a website, buy loads of cheap spyware traffic to pump up your stats, boast about your traffic and see what happens.

But there are other plausible reasons to buy spyware traffic. In particular, cheap spyware traffic can be used to inflate a site’s traffic statistics. Buying widespread “forced visits” causes widely-used traffic measurements to over report a site’s popularity: Traffic measurements mistakenly assume users arrived at the site because they actually wanted to go there, without considering the possibility that the visit was involuntary. Nonetheless, from the site’s perspective, forced visits offer real benefits: Investors will be willing to pay more to buy a site that seems to be more popular, and advertisers may be willing to pay more for their ads to appear. In some sectors, higher reported traffic may create a buzz of supposed popularity — helping to recruit bona fide users in the future.

Video sites are strikingly prevalent in the preceding examples and in other forced-visit traffic I have observed. Why? Google’s $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube inspired others hoping to receive even a fraction of YouTube’s valuation. So far no competitor has gained much traction. But the expectation that video sites grow virally creates an incentive to try to jump-start traffic by any means possible — even spyware-originating traffic.

Low-cost spyware-originating traffic can vastly increase a site’s reported popularity. Consider Alexa’s plot of Roo TV traffic. During April 2007 (when I first began to observe spyware-originating forced visits of Roo TV), Alexa reports that Roo’s reach and page views both jumped by an order of magnitude. It is difficult to know how much of this jump results from spyware-originating forced-visit traffic — rather than other kinds of forced visits, or conceivably bona fide user interest. But the New York Times piece reported that when ComScore last year adjusted Entrepreneur’s statistics to account for forced visits, traffic was reduced by 65%. A similar reduction may be required for the sites set out above. Source: How Spyware-Driven Forced Visits Inflate Web Site Traffic Counts

Ben references Roo TV traffic and the jump in their Alexa ranking when he first started seeing the spyware forced visits, and it is a big jump for sure. Compare to Joost, which is probably not a good comparison, they started out pretty big and are just getting bigger. Roo TV only has a little over 100 sites linking to it, while the Joost numbers are approaching 300,000 linking in, according to Alexa. Does that really mean anything? No, but I think it could be an indicator, most users, once they find a site they like will bookmark or just type it in, but you need word of mouth and press to help jumpstart traffic, if no one is linking to your site, then where are the visitors coming from to start with? I visited the Roo TV site, and couldn’t find any statistics on the videos that let you know how many times they have been watched, but I just did a quick look on the individual video pages, so it is hard to judge how much traffic their most popular videos are getting.

I have to mention that Orbitz was, AGAIN, mentioned in one of Ben’s articles, you would think these guys would learn….

Added: Forgot the link…