The Thrill of Rising Yahoo Traffic
October 21, 2016
I love the Gray Lady. The Bits column is chock full of technology items which inspire, excite, and sometimes implant silly ideas in readers’ minds. That’s real journalism.
Navigate to “Daily Report: Explaining Yahoo’s Unexpected Rise in Traffic.”
The write up pivots on the idea that Internet traffic can be monitored in a way that is accurate and makes sense. A click is a click. A packet is a packet. Makes sense. The are the “minor” points of figuring out which clicks are from humans and which clicks are from automated scripts performing some function like probing for soft spots. There are outfits which generate clicks for various reasons including running down a company’s advertising “checkbook.” There are clicks which ask such questions as, “Are you alive?” or “What’s the response time?” You get the idea because you have a bit of doubt about traffic generated by a landing page, a Web site, or even an ad. The counting thing is difficult.
The write up in the Gray Lady assumes that these “minor” points are irrelevant in the Yahoo scheme of themes; for example:
an increased number of people were drawn to Yahoo in September. The reason may have been Yahoo’s disclosure that month that hackers stole data on 500 million users in 2014.
“People”? How do we know that the traffic is people?
The Gray Lady states:
Yahoo’s traffic has been declining for a long time, overtaken by more adept, varied and apparently secure places to stay on the internet.
Let’s think about this. We don’t know if the traffic data are counting humans, software scripts, or utility functions. We do know that Yahoo has been on a glide path to a green field without rocks and ruts. We know that Yahoo is a bit of a hoot in terms of management.
My hunch is that Yahoo’s traffic is pretty much what it has been; that is, oscillating a bit but heading in for a landing, either hard or soft.
Suggesting that Yahoo may be growing is interesting but unfounded. That traffic stuff is mushy. What’s the traffic to the New York Times’s pay walled subsite? How does the Times know that a click is a human from a “partner” and not a third party scraping content?
And maybe the traffic spike is a result of disenchanted Yahoo users logging in to change their password or cancel their accounts.
Stephen E Arnold, October 21, 2016
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One Response to “The Thrill of Rising Yahoo Traffic”
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Hey Stephen . I understand where you’re going with this, but still dont think that they would be so rude to use bot traffic in their official numbers.
it would be fraud and not something a listed company would be stupid enough to do it.
/Frederik