The Web Has Become More Spammy (Bot Traffic) Than E-mail
The Web we once knew is dying; to cope with loads caused by bots consider going static
[via, linking to Igal Zeifman]
THE sister site is receiving a lot of Web traffic, but it's unclear how much of it is people and how much is just bots (we already block a lot!)... a problem we hardly had 2 decades ago when the site was young.
There are two issues here; one is spam traffic (see the above, "How Much Web Traffic Is Bot Traffic?") and another is the Webspam issue. To quote: "Webspam is a term used to describe content created solely to manipulate search engine rankings and thus violating Google’s webmaster guidelines. They don’t provide any value for searchers."
Those are separate but simultaneous issues. They predate the LLM hype and we already have E-mail to serve as a cautionary tale. Aside from unwanted E-mails there's a lot of outright spam. In mail, Microsoft is still the 0.2% (same as before), but Windows botnets contribute a great deal to E-mail spam. To quote recent statistics: "In 2023, nearly 45.6 percent of all e-mails worldwide were identified as spam, down from almost 49 percent in 2022. While remaining a big part of the e-mail traffic, since 2011, the share of spam e-mails has decreased significantly."
That's less than shown in the above pie of Web traffic.
And depending on what's measured (pre-filtering for instance), some estimates are indicating that spam is "now 90 percent of all e-mail" (likely an exaggeration, unsourced too).
This is where the Web is heading. Prepare now. Don't let every random spam/bot traffic cost you in database quotient. Go static. The sooner, the better. █
Image via vwo.com.