Strange!

Hits on Fletcher's Castoria Blog

Sometime around Thanksgiving last year the user hits on this blog suddenly jumped from about 110  per day to about 350 hits per day ... roughly tripling. The source of this dramatic jump was at first Russia, but it quickly shifted back to the United States. And the pattern of these hits is quite regular ... syncopated if you will ... and is continuing ... see the above chart of hits on this blog during the last day. Strange!

I have been scratching my head about this sudden and regular change in referencing rates to this blog and can only conclude one thing -- that a bot, or some automated software agent, is regularly generating 35 or so references to this site roughly every three hours night and day, every day. The next question is why?

My guess is that this bot is generating regular hits to this blog ... and probable attempted  click-throughs on contained ads --- which is also strange since, as you may have noticed, there are no revenue-generating ads on this blog ... which means that I could be grabbing some nice pocket change by doing so. (I consciously opt not to.)  And why might this bot be doing this? To me, I can only conclude that this is an attempt to inflate the appearance of click-throughs to either the placers of these (non-existent) ads ... or their surrogates. I do know that there have been suggestions that there are shenanigans in this possible phony ad revenue generating process on the Internet ... see: Bloomberg Article.

Are search sites or social media sites fudging things to inflate their ad revenue numbers from unsuspecting advertises? I suspect that, at some point soon, we will learn some disturbing revelations.

Are we in another Internet bubble?

Afterthoughts: You would think the designers of this assumed bot wouldd randomize the intervals and the number of hits generated? Or do they assume we are all tech illiterate? And will they stop referencing this blog site when the figure out that there are no ads here?