NY Mag: Most Internet Traffic Is 'Fake'

New York Magazine claimed this week that most Internet traffic is “fake.”

In a Wednesday article titled, “How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually,” New York Magazine ruled that most “metrics” on the Internet “are fake,” and reported, “Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot.”

“The metrics are fake,” the article continued, claiming that “not even Facebook, the world’s greatest data–gathering organization, seems able to produce genuine figures.”

“Can we still trust the metrics? After the Inversion, what’s the point? Even when we put our faith in their accuracy, there’s something not quite real about them,” the article expressed. “And maybe we shouldn’t even assume that the people are real. Over at YouTube, the business of buying and selling video views is ‘flourishing,’ as the Times reminded readers with a lengthy investigation in August.”

In response to the article, former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao declared, “It’s all true: Everything is fake. Also mobile user counts are fake. No one has figured out how to count logged-out mobile users, as I learned at reddit.”

“Every time someone switches cell towers, it looks like another user and inflates company user metrics,” she stated. “And if an unlogged-in user uses the site on multiple devices, each device counts as a unique user.”

Twitter users reacted to Pao with skepticism based on the elaborate systems the Silicon Valley Masters of the Universe have developed to learn everything about their users.