Tag Archives: fake news

Unusually high traffic from China

Fake Traffic from China

For dedicated readers of my blog, you’ll notice that I’ve written a bunch of posts recently about the election that’s coming up and about Trump and people close to Trump. On Friday I posted my live reaction and summarization of Louis DeJoy’s testimony in front of a US Senate committee. By the things he said, he seems to take perjury as seriously as the commitment to delivering the mail in a timely fashion.

While my dislike of Louis DeJoy has about reached the level of that of Will Shortz (yeah, I know), I believe these recent posts on my blog about the Trump Administration have yielded unusual traffic.

According to my WordPress stats, more than 20% of my traffic came from China on Saturday, and close to 20% of traffic to my blog has come from China so far today.

Today’s traffic so far

I’m not the only one who thinks this is fake traffic. I get pennies of ad revenue from my blog, and I’m at the mercy of WordPress’s decisions of how to place ads on my blog. I do not chose the content or the advertisers. Any ads shown on my blog are not indications that I support those things or even know they’re being shown.

But WordPress also decides what to count as eligible ads and what not to count as ads served. If they disallow traffic, it’s reflected as a low number in the ads served section of my stats. I prefer the eligible ad count to be high, but the ads served number has been low.

My conclusion is that China is getting involved and is wasting no time. I guess I’ve merited the attention of things coming from China, and that’s an accomplishment for sure, but I’m concerned because I cannot be the only one who is experiencing this. If they’re looking to interfere with our elections, that’s bad. It’s not unexpected, but it’s bad.

I’ll keep watching out to see if this trend continues.