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Happy fingers: All those clicks may be bots

 

Clicks are the rule of the game. They were supposed to be an accurate measure for everything. How successful ads are; how popular your posts are, how many readers your story is getting, and the like.

But it turns out it may simply be the happy fingers of those creatures that roam around the cyber world: bots. In other words, they don’t really care about your creative flair or the depth of your thoughts. They are only there to laugh at your marketing plans and fool you, as well as your clients. That is, if all you and they count are “clicks.”

A number of these bots refresh your social media content and feeds, or help rank you on Google. It’s nonetheless phony. There are the evil cousins too, those who carry out cyberattacks (obviously at the command of their human masters, at least for the time being).

All in all, bots—harmless or not—move around 52 percent of web traffic, according to a report by the security firm Imperva. This should help assess content on its own merits rather than a mere function of clicks.

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