Who Is Ordering Those Display Ads?

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Recent MediaPost information shed some light on how Display Ads are getting placed...

Two-thirds of all traffic to websites linked from a tweet emanates from a bot, according to findings of an exhaustive computational analysis released this morning by the Pew Research Center.

The study, which analyzed more than 1.2 million tweets linking to 2,215 popular websites between July 27 and Sept. 11, 2017, found that 66% of all traffic came from bots, not people.

Interestingly, the No. source of bot traffic via twitter was not news, nor propaganda, or even product marketing, but porn. Okay, so technically, adult entertainment is a product, but when looking at the breakdown by genre, it's another indication of the pornography industry's early adoption and innovation of new media technologies that goes back throughout the history of electronic media.

Sports was the No. 2 content genre spread by bots, followed by product marketing, then news.

“The study is part of a larger research endeavor by the Pew Research Center to better understand the flow of information online,” says Computational Social Scientist Stefan Wojcik, adding: “It’s not easy to know if an account is a bot, or not.”