These numbers are legitimately shocking.
This week, Super Bowl 2024 shattered records, with the NFL championship broadcast on CBS becoming the most-watched televised event in U.S. history.
Also riding high from the big game? Elon Musk’s X. The company formerly known as Twitter published its own press release, lauding Super Bowl LVIII as one of the biggest events ever on the social media platform with more than 10 billion impressions and over 1 billion video views.
Super Bowl LVIII was one of the biggest ever on X – completely smashing key metrics from last year, with impressions, user posts and video views rising 31%, 41% and 75% respectively YoY.
With an epic overtime game delivering a huge surge in visibility and engagement, brands on X…
— Business (@XBusiness) February 13, 2024
However, it appears that a significant portion of that traffic on X could be fake, according to data provided to Mashable by CHEQ, a leading cybersecurity firm that tracks bots and fake users.
According to CHEQ, a whopping 75.85 percent of traffic from X to its advertising clients’ websites during the weekend of the Super Bowl was fake.
“I’ve never seen anything even remotely close to 50 percent, not to mention 76 percent,” CHEQ founder and CEO Guy Tytunovich told Mashable regarding X’s fake traffic data. “I’m amazed…I’ve never, ever, ever, ever seen anything even remotely close.”
CHEQ’s data for this report is based on 144,000 visits to its clients’ sites that came from X during Super Bowl weekend, from Friday, Feb. 9 up until the end of Super Bowl Sunday on Feb. 11. The data was collected from across CHEQ’s 15,000 total clients. It’s a small portion of the relevant data, and it’s not scientifically sampled, but it nonetheless suggests a dramatic trend.
CHEQ monitors bots and fake users across the internet in order to minimize online ad fraud for its clients. Tytunovich’s company accomplishes this by tracking how visitors from different sources, such as X, interact with a client’s page after they click one of their links. The company can also tell when a bot is passing itself off as a real user, such as when a fraudulent user is faking what type of operating system they are using to view a website.
Most X users who are regularly on the platform can attest to a noticeable uptick in seemingly inauthentic activity in recent months. When a post goes viral on X, its now commonplace to find bots filling the replies with AI-generated responses or accounts with randomly generated usernames spamming a user’s mentions with unsolicited “link-in-bio” promotions. Now, there’s data which backs up that user experience.
Advertisers have also noticed X’s bot issues. In a recently published piece in The Guardian, Gene Marks, a small business owner shared his ad campaign results from X. After a small $50 advertising spend, X’s analytics shows that his website had received 350 clicks from approximately 29,000 views. However, according to Google Analytics, X wasn’t the source of any of the actual traffic his website had received during that time period.
In our conversation with Tytunovich, he referenced an often cited stat that roughly half of all internet traffic is made up of bots, and how he’s long been skeptical of that data based on what CHEQ itself sees.
“We were always the conservative ones,” Tytunovich explained regarding CHEQ’s approach to fake user data. “We protect a lot of our customers on Google Ads, YouTube, and even TikTok, which I’m not a fan of, and we’ve always said 50 percent [being fake] is a bit opportunistic.”
Source : https://mashable.com/article/x-twitter-elon-musk-bots-fake-traffic