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There's a marketing technique in which a service loads certain blogs a couple times to let certain URLs appear in the traffic source of said blog. The blogger is then enticed to look why suddenly dozens if not hundreds of visitors came from that place.
The technique is no issue for bloggers with a huge audience, but it skewers the stats and annoys bloggers who have but hundreds of real visitors a day, like me.
Now I can see these things in my stats of the week's referring URLs.
What I can observe is a weird shift; usually the URLs that got pushed like that were assorted, often scammers or companies that offer services to bloggers.
This changed rapidly, and suddenly; now mostly American right wing blogs get promoted this way, and with substantial "visitor" counts (around 40-120 a week). It's not all political blogs, though; there are also two couple (non-commercial) law-related blogs and one medical-related blog involved. Not a single political non-right wing blog was promoted, though.
The shift was so sudden that a decentralised motivation is utterly improbable. I suspect somebody with enough money decided to promote a certain portfolio of American right wing blogs in a fairly invisible way (invisible compared to fake followers on twitter etc.). An alternative explanation would be that somebody promoted this way of promotion, but it's quite implausible that bloggers with very few posts per month would pay for such a promotion. Their inclusion makes rather sense as providers of plausible denial or as part of a third possible (unlikely) explanation; a bug inside the statistics software of blogger.com.
And yes, I checked. These right wing blogs did not suddenly begin to link to me. These are no real referrals. I know a couple right wing bloggers who did link to me occasionally, and they are not among the ones who now benefited from that promotion.
S O
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'The shift was so sudden that a decentralised motivation is utterly improbable. I suspect somebody with enough money decided to promote a certain portfolio of American right wing blogs in a fairly invisible way (invisible compared to fake followers on twitter etc.).'
ReplyDeleteBe careful, sven. Thats starting to sound awfully much like a conspiracy theory :)
'An alternative explanation would be that somebody promoted this way of promotion, but it's quite implausible that bloggers with very few posts per month would pay for such a promotion.'
LOL, who do you think is responsible for this? Donald trump? That is an implausibly smart thing for him to do.
'These are no real referrals. I know a couple right wing bloggers who did link to me occasionally, and they are not among the ones who now benefited from that promotion.'
I'm one of them, right? Who is the other?
No, I was thinking of ChicagoBoyz, Unreligious Right and so on.
DeleteI wrote this so maybe someone who thinks of himself as investigative journalist might do some research, asking other bloggers for their stats.
I asked MilPub, and they have a similar pattern. Did you look into your own referring sites stats recently?
I have seen some weird peaks here and there, but its all from anonymous sources (google, yahoo, etc). So I can't really comment on any marketing scams.
DeleteBTW, I am actually a far right conservative. Hope that doesn't make me a bad guy.
It depends on subject and timing.
Deletehttp://defense-and-freedom.blogspot.de/2009/10/conservatives-vs-progressives.html
Yeah, every now and again I'll get these weird page hit spikes that make a mess of the stats in general. For what its worth, this blog is in my blog roll, doubt you're getting much traffic from that though aside from just me.
ReplyDelete