Link: https://www.techdirt.com/2016/09/26/traffic-is-fake-audience-numbers-are-garbage-nobody-knows-how-many-people-see-anything/

How many living, breathing human beings really read Techdirt? The truth — the most basic, rarely-spoken truth — is that we have no earthly idea. With very few exceptions, no media property big or small, new or old, online or off, can truly tell you how big its audience is. They may have never thought about it that way — after all, we all get as close as we can to what we think is a reasonably accurate estimation, though we have no way of confirming that — but all these numbers are actually good for (maybe) is relative comparisons. What does it really mean when someone says “a million people” saw something? Or ten or a hundred million? I don’t know, and neither do you. (Netflix might, but we’ll get to that later.)

Where should we start? How about this: internet traffic is half-fake and everyone’s known it for years, but there’s no incentive to actually acknowledge it. The situation is technically improving: 2015 was hailed (quietly, among people who aren’t in charge of selling advertising) as a banner year because humans took back the majority with a stunning 51.5% share of online traffic, so hurray for that I guess.

All the analytics suites, the ad networks and the tracking pixels can try as they might to filter the rest out, and there’s plenty of advice on the endless Sisyphean task of helping them do so, but considering at least half of all that bot traffic comes from bots that fall into the “malicious” or at least “unauthorized” category, and thus have every incentive to subvert the mostly-voluntary systems that are our first line of defence against bots… Well, good luck. We already know that Alexa rankings are garbage, but what does this say about even the internal numbers that sites use to sell ad space? Could they even be off by a factor of 10? I don’t know, and neither do you. Hell, we don’t even know how accurate the 51.5% figure is — it could be way off… in either direction.

I worked for a big data collection company and the dirty secret was that our ads barely converted

Aren't people who lived in the past so silly and stupid with how they believed delusions about the world derived from myth, superstition and dogma? So glad I live during the modern day and don't have to deal with that.

Interestingly, the data we threw out because it was from porn sites actually performed really well.

Somebody created an ad campaign for adult diapers and linked it to people who watched granny porn and it was 10x more effective.

(They got fired for this.)

I presume fired because they proved the data could actually produce results and would unfortunately prove that they were being used incorrectly for... the entire time or proof of lies to investor's?

No, it was because big companies wouldn’t cut us big checks if we used porn data, and we liked big checks.

Doesnt matter if the process works or not. Just no porn.

(They got fired for this.)

Kinda seems like everybody ended up shitting in their bed here.

Not if they bought the diapers from the ad!

Nah I meant after they got fired for doing it lol

Is there a measure for off line conversions? My wife never click on an ad, but is telling me all the time about something interesting she saw in ad and want to look it up

No and that’s part of the problem. Conversions to sales based on clicks is easy to track. But if they mention something to someone who buys something there’s no way know.

Which is the dirty secret, and why Coca-Cola still needs to advertise.

It's hard for creators to parody advertising because it's already so absurd. I wish the internet could have taken a different path

"Easy" if it goes through a predictable path directly in a short time period and nothing breaks. I've worked with plenty of advertisers and it's disgusting how poorly even very well funded companies get it to work.

I could imagine some statistician getting a Nobel prize for figuring out how to measure “we spent $1000 on advertising and it increased our sales by $1005”.

I mean that is the real point of all of this, isn’t it?

When you see companies that don’t advertise still making money you have to wonder why all of our eyeballs are full of shit all the time.

It’s why we had folks with math degrees working in our analytics team

Yes but we have more metrics to measure now and that contributes greatly to truthiness!

The more numbers you have the smarter you are which is why Google is smartest company.

Advertising is narrative in the singular and totalitarian, whereas creators are allergic to the idea of a single narrative truly defining or containing what it encompasses.

Actual storytelling is about searching for and sharing those precious things that deconstruct singular and totalitarian narrative.

Artists hate easy answers and advertising is such an easy answer that it can be given to you before you even ask.

We spent 10% more on marketing this period and saw sales grow 12%. That was worth the spend!

We spent 10% more on marketing this period but sales shrunk 5% due to externalities. We'll need to increase that spend next period.

It's all barely correlated nonsense.

Sounds a lot like Catholicism!