I have been able to Google Earth zoom to a property with one of the variants. Not saying this is the one. I got a nice screenshot.
I like checking out services. I do this on just about everyone who catches my eye. This next snip clicks to source.
This is not the first timestamp I've been able to corroborate to a real time adjustment update in the regularly scheduled spam hits.
I could post a list of guesses as to agenda, but that's pointless. Just saying real person, real time, massively screwing with my stats.
All-time count, around 17K hits I have proof are from one source.
I don't appreciate this. I've clearly stated it's ruining my fun. I haven't been able to see real view counts in months in my blogger stats. Because it's affected me personally, statcounter, which is already extremely conservative, is showing me that my link sharing is dramatically falling off, and I'm losing my launch platform.
I've talked about stats and view counts and hits and web traffic off and on for years. The numbers can be fun when you learn how to use them to increase your audience. They can also be a big problem when the stat host (in this case, Blogger) fails to handle spam hitting getting around the spam filters. Google Analytics doesn't even see this happening, but it's still 1- not useful in the way I use stats and 2- extra work. Statcounter also doesn't see this happening, but at least I was able to get solid evidence of someone actually doing this. Someone is personally vetting what goes onto the spam hit list. This has been going on for months. M O N T H S.
Analytics has come a long way in ten years, but the toughest part is sifting out how much counting comes in from one person clicking, now that we have proxy hosts and invisible browsing available with most browsers. My best real reader might give me one real hit a day, while a fly-by might ding me 6 or 7 times through browser proxy, social media routing (like Facebook), local service hosting, device ping, etc. It's ridiculous.
I know a lot of you find this very boring and probably think I'm too concerned with it, but there is so much stuff on the webs about this stuff. I'm the only one I know actually live blogging about it with an actual demo.
In the end, don't be fooled by 'big time' bloggers who get a million hits a year. A lot of that isn't real people. I just demo'd that 17K hits are from one source playing a spam game for whatever reason, possibly making some kind of money off my blog with an app thingy posting content to a curator, which means readers are reading MY stuff on another site I didn't make. Am I mad? Nope. Not at all. It's happened before, it'll happen again, in the words of a very wise Time Prophet.
Salut France, comment vas-tu?
In the meantime, I keep dreaming.
