Is spyware driving your site metrics?

Information Week has an interesting article on the use of spyware driven traffic boosting the traffic counts of sites. They claim that video sites are the most prone to doing this because of the 1.65 Billion buy out of YouTube.

A study by spyware researcher Ben Edelman finds that spyware-driven traffic inflation is common, particularly at video sites. What’s more, Edelman said that spyware also is being used to manipulate the popularity of YouTube videos. The study identifies Bolt.com, GrindTV.com, Broadcaster.com, Away.com, RooTV.com, and Diet.com as the beneficiaries of spyware-driven traffic. Source: Information Week

The direct link to Ben Edelman’s findings is here. When you go through them it seems that what he found is a fairly old game, where pop up and pop under advertising that calls a page or process on the web site that then inflates the statistics of that web site.

Since this is not a new game, and fairly old in terms of how long this has been done to inflate web statistics, if you remember the ubiquitous ads for the X10 Camera that over time made that web site one of the most popular web sites on the planet, all though pop up/under advertising.

What makes this process less than trivial is that Ben then goes on to suggest that the buy out of YouTube is one of the main reasons to inflate traffic. If they look popular, then they might command a better price should someone want to buy them out. The only problem with that is that part of due diligence for the purchaser should be to verify the traffic and where that traffic is coming from.

If the purchaser sees the traffic as adware or spyware generated, then they might just kill off the purchase, however this does mean that the purchaser has to do due diligence when it comes to the valuation of a web property.

ComScore takes a dim view of this kind of manipulation, and will reduce the sites rankings if this kind of thing is found to be happening. This will kill off a deal, and in the long run, if building traffic using means that indicate a lack of thinking, how many people are really going to want to buy that property later on?