Ghost Sites Generate Traffic But Not Much Else
April 1, 2013
Due to a low rate of turnover and clickthroughs and the often unreliable world of ad exchange and technology that promises sky high viewership that they just can not deliver on, the rise of digital tricksters is at an all time high.
You’ve heard of a ghost writer, well, “Meet the Most Suspect Publishers On the Web: The Rise of Ghost Sites, Where Traffic is Huge but People are Few.”
“Increasingly, digital agencies and buy-side technology firms are seeing massive traffic and audience spikes from groups of Web publishers few people have ever heard of. These sites—billed as legitimate media properties—are built to look authentic on the surface, with generic, nonalarm-sounding content. But after digging deeper, it becomes evident that very little of these sites’ audiences are real people. Yet big name advertisers are spending millions trying to reach engaged users on these properties.”
That is right, companies like DigiMogul and Alphabird are getting advertisers to pay to leave an impression on a viewer that may or may not exist. The problem with this is you get pretty lousy search results due to the lack of actual humans hitting and working on the site. But with bots driving up traffic, those big names like BMW, Pillsbury, and JetBlue are clamoring to throw their money at the company in an effort to reach “consumers.”
Sounds a little backward to us.
Leslie Radcliff, April 3, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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