Hey, it worked for The Most Popular Blog in Science Fiction. Lie about your traffic, secure the contract, then pray that no one notices the way in which your subsequent performance doesn’t quite line up with your supposed influence. What’s wrong with a little traffic inflation among friends?
The publisher of Newsweek and the International Business Times has been engaging in fraudulent online traffic practices that helped it secure a major ad buy from a US government agency, according to a new report released today by independent ad fraud researchers.
IBTimes.com, the publisher’s US business site, last year won a significant portion of a large video and display advertising campaign for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal agency. Social Puncher, a consulting firm that investigates online ad fraud, alleges in its report that the ads were displayed to an audience on IBTimes.com that includes a significant amount of “cheap junk traffic with a share of bots.”
The CFPB’s ad budget was the subject of criticism from Republican lawmakers after the Daily Caller reported last year that it had awarded more than $40 million in contracts to a single ad agency, GMMB, which is one of the top Democratic media strategists. (A portion of money in those contracts was used to pay media outlets for advertising space, and was not kept by GMMB.)
The CFPB was created in 2011 as a result of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. President Trump recently tweeted that the bureau “has been a total disaster,” and installed his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, as its new director.
Neither the CFPB or GMMB are accused of taking part in, or having knowledge of, ad fraud on IBTimes.com.
A CFPB spokesperson told BuzzFeed News the bureau is looking into the allegations raised in Social Puncher’s report…. When it comes to IBT’s fraudulent traffic practices, Social Puncher’s findings align with reporting from BuzzFeed News on IBT India, and with separate data gathered by Pixalate, an ad fraud detection company, and DoubleVerify, a digital media measurement company. (Social Puncher and BuzzFeed News previously collaborated on ad fraud investigations, but worked separately in this case.)
Based on what it described as a detailed investigation, DoubleVerify this week classified IBT’s US, UK, India, and Singapore sites as “as having fraud or sophisticated invalid traffic,” according COO Matt McLaughlin. DoubleVerify is now blocking all ad impressions on these sites on behalf of customers.
I always find it amusing when the SJWs in science fiction try to accuse me of inflating or exaggerating my numbers because I never report anything except exactly the Google pageviews reported by Blogger. But their accusations tell me that they are aware that other people in science fiction do so.
By the way, yesterday’s pageviews were 141,106. It’s been informative to see how neither USA Today nor Wired moved the traffic needle more than a very small fraction, but one brief appearance on The Milo Show has temporarily increased daily traffic by about 40 percent. The members of the maintream media really have no idea how individually irrelevant most of them are. Even with the benefit of a prestigious platform, they don’t have much an influence.