In every industry and every genre of life, there are specific terms that become the center of attention. As humans, we like to choose certain concepts to focus on, certain topics of interest to fixate upon. It helps to gain a feeling of understanding - when one masters the key concepts of an industry, they gain the ability to claim "expertise". The terms that describe these key concepts are called buzzwords, and they wield an immeasurable amount of power. Although intangible, the focus on buzzwords produces significant and impactful results.
The technology sector is one that has seen a wealth of hot topics come and go over the years. Some of these ideas transform into successful businesses, while others fizzle out into a quiet yet turbulent end. For the general consumer, the flurry of buzzwords can often seem confusing and overwhelming. While some have meaning and express a valuable potential, others deflate when probed too carefully. This article marks the beginning of many, a new series focused on clarity and communication. Below is the first buzzword, debunked and explained, in an effort to provide a greater level of transparency into the tech world.
- Web Traffic
Web traffic should be thought of as a measurement, units and all. It is, simply, the amount of visits a website receives over some pre-defined period of time. The units of a web traffic measurement can vary depending on the amount of time you wish to analyze. So it could be visits per hour, visits per century, or anything in between.
Web traffic is often used as a measurement of website success and popularity, but can be fairly easily manipulated. One could set up bots to access a website every couple minutes twenty four hours a day, with enough space in between visits to avoid an accidental DDoS. It is also important to remember that web traffic in itself doesn't really tell the whole tale. Whether users move on to other pages within a site or immediately leave is known as the bounce rate, and also serves as a substantial metric for website success.
Traffic Sources
The sources of web traffic have been changing drastically in recent years. Traditional PC traffic only accounted for 53 percent of total IP traffic in 2015. By the end of the decade, and potentially beforehand, smartphone traffic is predicted to overtake PC traffic, with an estimated growth rate of 58 percent. Twenty-sixteen was set to be the year where global IP traffic would increase beyond a zettabyte (one trillion gigabytes, or one sextillion bytes), although the jury's still out on the official results. While it does sound like a lot of information, and is, it doesn't actually mean a whole lot, and the world was well prepared to progress past this meaningless marker.
Web traffic data can also reveal intriguing insights into internet trends. In 2013, Incapsula reported that human-controlled web traffic accounted for less than 40 percent of the total traffic observed. The rest was a variety of bots, gathering information or generating unethical webpage views. In 2015 however, the same company reported a reversal of trends, which many thought unimaginable. The human race had reasserted their dominance over the world wide web, if only by a little over one percent. The reasoning was that while there were still a plethora of bots in existence, many websites had figured out how to block them, especially large profile sites. This, combined with the increase of internet availability around the globe, caused the human web presence to dominate once again. The future is as much a mystery as ever, but with the recent surge in the internet of things and the prevalence of the Mirai malware, I would expect bots to be back on top in no time.