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I constantly get relatively high number of likes on a lot of my posts. Everytime I click on the profile of those likers I see either :
- Empty tumblr blog with a lot of likes and a lot of people that are followed
- Very active tumblr blog with insane number of reblogs (like every 10 mins) and no original posts.
- Spammers (most often porn)
Also the names of those users are rediculous; always some weird words with numbers at the end. Wtf? Obviously my posts are not as good as I thought they are and most of those likers are bots.
And than I see tumblr related news on sites like techcrunch:
”Tumblr does 250 million pageviews in one day”
”Tumblr is a pageview machine, now bigger than wikipedia”
Their traffic also looks insane:


I realise that not all that traffic is produced by bots. But exactly how much of these impressive statistics are bot-shinanigans?
0.1 % ? 1 % ? 10 % ?! On my blog, the precentage of bot-visitors are, by my judgement, is as high as 2/3.
This is a very serious question, especially considering that tumblr recently closed a 85 million $ funding round based on pageviews alone.
All this is mind-boggling for me and if someone could explain this ‘bot’ thing to me I would very much appreciate.
How much of total page traffic are bots? Do they even count? Whats google take on this? Do investors really know real visitor-bot ratio? Have you seen the similar trend on your tumblr blog? Am I the only real human on tumblr ? :)
EDIT: This post has generated so much interest and sparked so many discussions even Techcrunch wrote an article about this. Hell yeah :P