http://vesselnews.io/fake-newsflow-new- ... wo-months/
Traffic begins to pick up significantly around the middle of December for all three. Here’s a look at the overall picture compared to various other news outlets:
That’s odd. Now let’s take a look at each outlet’s traffic by country for the NYT, which shows significant increases in visitors from China, jumping from 5.1% to 49.2% of all site traffic in two months:
What’s most interesting is that The NY Times has been completely blocked in China since 2012, and just last month Apple was ordered to pull two NYT apps from the App store despite users being unable to view content since the original 2012 ban. Per the NY Times:
“When the Chinese government began blocking the Times websites in 2012, it also prevented users with Times apps from downloading new content.“ People seeking to bypass internet filters have traditionally used VPN’s (Virtual Private Networks) which tunnel through China’s highly restrictive firewall, however China has been cracking down on VPN use for several years.
Now let’s take a look at the Washington Post and The Guardian, which are notblocked in China – jumping from virtually no traffic to 58.9% and 57% of site-wide visitors respectively.
These dramatic increases in traffic have significantly bumped each site’s Alexa ranking by as much as 38%, a key metric used in website valuation. Of note, BBC.com experienced a similar boost, and others may have as well.
Not to overstate the obvious, but considering the URL ban on the New York Times, one might conclude that this massive increase which now accounts for nearly half of all website traffic is some type of high volume traffic generating bot server unimpeded by China’s restrictive firewall, synthetically inflating visitor counts for affected sites.
Check if your local Lügenpresse-outlet gets ad revenue with the same method at http://alexa.com
