Oh, but humans are actually not the source of all profit! This is where phenomena like click fraud become interesting.
Some estimates for 2025: around 20-30% of all ad clicks were bots. Around $200B in ad spend annually lost to click fraud.
So this is where it gets really interesting right, the platforms are filled with bots, maybe a quarter? of the monetizable action occurring on them IS NOT HUMAN but lots of it gets paid for anyway.
It's turtles all the way down. One little hunk of software, serving up bits to another little hunk of software, constitutes perhaps a quarter of what they call "social" media.
We humans aren't the minority player in all this yet, the bots are still only 25%, but how much do you want to bet that those proportions will flip in our lifetimes?
The future of that whole big swathe of the Internet is probably that it will be 75% some weird shell game between algorithms, and 25% people who have completely lost their minds by participating in it and believing it's real.
I have no idea what this all means for the fate of economics and society but I do know that in my day to day life I'm a lot happier if I just steer clear of these weird little paperclip maximizing robots. To reference the original article, getting too involved with them literally makes you go crazy and think more often about suicide.
> Some estimates for 2025: around 20-30% of all ad clicks were bots. Around $200B in ad spend annually lost to click fraud.
I think this is the wrong way to look at it.
Bots lower the cost per click so they should have net zero impact on overall ad spend.
Imagine if the same number of humans were clicking on ads but the numbers of bots increased tenfold. Would total ad spend increase accordingly? No, it would remain the same because budgets don't magically increase. The average value of a click would just go down.
Some estimates for 2025: around 20-30% of all ad clicks were bots. Around $200B in ad spend annually lost to click fraud.
So this is where it gets really interesting right, the platforms are filled with bots, maybe a quarter? of the monetizable action occurring on them IS NOT HUMAN but lots of it gets paid for anyway.
It's turtles all the way down. One little hunk of software, serving up bits to another little hunk of software, constitutes perhaps a quarter of what they call "social" media.
We humans aren't the minority player in all this yet, the bots are still only 25%, but how much do you want to bet that those proportions will flip in our lifetimes?
The future of that whole big swathe of the Internet is probably that it will be 75% some weird shell game between algorithms, and 25% people who have completely lost their minds by participating in it and believing it's real.
I have no idea what this all means for the fate of economics and society but I do know that in my day to day life I'm a lot happier if I just steer clear of these weird little paperclip maximizing robots. To reference the original article, getting too involved with them literally makes you go crazy and think more often about suicide.