Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

I do not believe. I do not believe that bots account for more traffic than all the streaming services, all the filesharing and all the porn crisscrossing the internet. I would believe 73% of requests, even 73% of page loads/scrapes, but 73% of all traffic is too huge a number.

View on HN

Bots might "watch" Youtube for ad money for the creators and Google, though.

I mean, it would not surprise me at all if bot traffic on Youtube is larger as in bytes/s of video, than actual visitors.

Remember that Google has no interest in disclosing how many bot views there are.

There was this news article about Spotify banning some musicians accounts due to listen farming.

https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/great-big-spotify-sca...

Since the payouts are not tied to the individual watcher or listener, scams run rampant. I guess the temptation to manipulate the money flow is way higher than having a "fair" distribution of each subscribers money to the artists.

Most bots operate in the gray area of just getting the view count up and not messing with the ads. They can operate publicly and not have law enforcement raid their offices.

Yt definitely makes an effort to prevent that. You can read up on how botguard's virtual machine works in some older writeups.

On the more underground forums there are threads about using bots to watch your Twitch feeds to get revenue.

I would definitely believe that Bots are responsible for %73 of the traffic. Not sure how one would necessarily characterize them as "bad" but definitely wasteful. Worked at site that published science. They collected page view metrics. Doing something simple like excluding page views that where done by IP addresses that continuously cycled through all articles resulted in over a %70 reduction in page views. Needless to say it was never deployed because the high view numbers made the authors feel good.

I think that too.

I watched today a couple hours of Youtube videos. How many bots are needed to match that much traffic?

if we're talking about requests it makes sense. I just have to open my apache/nginx logs to see how many bots are attempting to get in.

I'm not defending the validity of this article but it is very rare that Netflix, Youtube, or any other stuff backed by the big CDNs(Content Delivery Networks) cross actual metered transit connections(for the networks, not including what the end user has to pay for their servivces.)

bots are still a subset of the traffic for streaming, porn, etc. Whether its for ad fraud or faking popularity on streaming those bots are running 24/7.

However I agree, on its face 73% sound ridiculous.

I think it's possible if for nothing else but the fact that a bot can easily do 10-100x or more visits than a human can on the web.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com