The Dark Art of Bots: How to Make $2 Million Online Without a Human Audience

Here is the weirdest thing about the modern web: humans are only one constituency, and maybe not the most profitable one.

Consider the case of an anonymous publishing executive who spoke with the media trade magazine, Digiday, about purchasing bulk robot traffic to his former company's website. 

By robot, I mean software that is designed to simulate a human being browsing the web. Bots, as they are known, are relatively easy to create, and now you can easily purchase their services to build a nice business, if you are willing to bend the rules of digital publishing. 

Arbitrage... Now With More Robots

In this case, the publisher paid $10,000 to $35,000 for the cheapest possible traffic, which companies domiciled outside the United States could provide for about $0.002 per visit. Then, they turned around and sold those visits for between $0.0025 and $0.004 through advertising networks, which act as clearinghouses for bulk advertising buys across the web. 

That's a pretty weird media business model, but it doesn't take a genius to realize this is a good arbitrage opportunity. Even if you only make one-tenth of a penny per visit, it's not that expensive to buy millions of visits, so you can make some serious money.

Let's do the math here. They were getting between 5 and 17.5 million visits per day and selling them for a fraction of a penny more to generate between $12,500 and $70,000 in revenue per day.

If they maxed out every day, buying the most traffic possible and selling it at the highest price, they'd make $2.1 million a month without ever creating anything that a human might want to look at. 

But Isn't This Fraud?

Yes, it is certainly fraud in the colloquial sense and may be fraud in the legal sense, too, as the publishing executive readily admitted. Robots don't buy anything, and showing them ads remains ineffective. 

The providers of the non-human traffic do not acknowledge that they are sending bots to load web pages. They tell the publishers that the traffic will be of "unknown quality." This is the code word. The publishers know that "unknown quality" means "unknown robots" but they sell ads anyway. 

And yet, the bots (at least the cheap ones) leave tell-tale tracks in the analytics software that companies use to track their visitors. 

"You can tell it’s bot traffic just by looking at the analytics. We’d see a traffic spike in our real-time analytics dashboard and then we would see all of our traffic for the day serve in a couple of hours," the publisher told DigiDay. "Or it would all come from users using the same really old version of Internet Explorer. Almost all our users had Flash versions from 2003, according to Google Analytics. That just doesn’t happen with real users."

In other words, detecting the simplest bots probably isn't hard. But ad networks don't really want to know about the makeup of their visitor pool because it might hurt their businesses. Same goes for publishers.

So, strangely, for now, there's a really tidy profit to be made showing web pages to robots.