The Rise of The Machines, or Are Bots Really Bad?

In my previous post Calculating Your True Social Media Reach, I had made reference to the video "Is YouTube's Business Model Broken?" in which two industry experts talked about the fact that it is difficult to count the number of views on YouTube simply because a good percentage of them originate with non-humans.

The experts then went on to suggest that perhaps a better way to determine your true social media reach was to leverage YouTube's analytics to determine the length of time that a viewer watches a video. If you are not familiar with YouTube's analytics including analysis of viewer retention rates please refer to this July 2012 article I wrote titled Is Anybody Watching?

Their advice is of course quite sound from the standpoint of attempting to separate the human from non-human views for a particular video. However, and given the experts reference to a video for a consumer product that went viral, I think that another more interesting question was raised. Specifically are Bots really bad?

The viral video in question had more than 18 million views of which 11 million according to the video's creators, were from non-human sources. Following a chicken or the egg line of thinking, would the video had received the 7 million human or "real" views if the Bot views had not created a buzz by "artificially" driving up the numbers.

Putting aside my contempt for this kind of snake oil salesmanship, it is a fair question given the fact that one study indicated that the average YouTube video only receives 500 views in total.

How many businesses out there would look at the 7 million real views to 11 million artificial views ratio as being an acceptable part of business?

After all, how different is this from the click through rates associated with say a Facebook ad campaign? For every 20,000 views, you receive 23 instances of real or active engagement.

The ratios with the Bots - at least in terms of exposure - are certainly more attractive.

So once again, and within the above context, Are Bots Really Bad?

This is an issue with which we are all going to have to eventually deal given the findings that in 2013 61.5% of all traffic on the web is of the non-human variety (see graph below).

Talk about the Rise of the Machines!