Sudden Rise In # Of Views

You will see numerous Discussion Threads about visits, the large numbers are Bots and they are good for getting your content found and ranked in search results.

Now and then you get a bot storm come in. Its sort of like when the locusts come to town, or a small village is inundated with spiders. They visit, they eat everything then they leave again, leaving only merely crumbs.

I haven't seen a sharp increase, I do notice on analytics my page is in german and french etc, so there may be more translations to the site that I don't know of and that increases the views?


----Mike Savad

Mine was a little higher than normal yesterday but it was just the photos I've promoted over the last few days. I've been getting hits on my GA from Nigeria also.

Increasing views is a good thing, right? Perhaps your creation hit a trending search or you got shared somewhere.

I would have previously argued it was mostly a good thing, but the bot views have jumped dramatically in the past year or so. It took me over 5 years to hit 1 million views. I'm suddenly at 1.8 million less than a year later. They've really ramped up for no discernable reason.

I passed 20 million. If I just got sales each time...


----Mike Savad

Do a good deed and send some towards me. At least they can cheer me up every now and then. 1 million bots? I'll take it. :))) That way I don't have to lie to myself it's all pink.

Alco Shirts,for a sure fire successful way to increase your views create a Mastodon account and post your work to it.It seems to me to be the only positive thing about the site.

John, I never heard of them until now but at a short search looks like something I need to research more and understand it. Thanks for the idea.

Cosmin

Still wondering what kind of scam is going on here..

Since 6 days already, my views count is rocketing sky high.
Hundreds, thousands of them are from New York City... now that's a big city, maybe a lot of bots live there?
Who knows... it might be possible..

But all the rest of them are from Aberdeen NJ!!
... now I looked it up (never heard of that place before); turns out, as of the 2020 United States census, the township's population was 19,329.
This must be unique! A town with more bots than people!

Have the terminators finally took over there and replaced the original population with synth copies??

What could be their purpose?

Stealing the identity of real life artists and replacing them with bots too?
I'm telling you fellow artists, this is getting scary!!

How are views a scam?


All bots, they work day and night

if bots wanted you, they wouldn't visit your site, they would sneak into your brain through your bluetooth in the earphone thing. I can't see this as scarey. I don't know what numbers your seeing, but I get an average of 30,000 a day now, and sometimes it spikes to 120,000, I suppose that could be scary. If they jumped out of my closet. But your safe.


----Mike Savad

@ Mike,
This was my sarcastic way of asking; why are they doing this? Lots of energy waisted for no results..
Or is it AI databases scraping the net for more images?
Don't think so; I'm fe on Saatchi gallery since almost 20 years now, nothing like that ever happens there... And that's a big art market place too.
Why are these bots targeting FAA?
Frankly, and no offense, but for AI databases scraping and collecting art, I could think of many better sources than FAA.
Anyway; those bots can find our work much easier on social media, where most of us post it anyway...copyable and unprotected.
And that's why I presume it's a completely different kind of scam scheme....
Who can gain by this?
Bots don't work for free, they cost hardware and electricity... so there's always a profit needed..
But what if it were not bots, but someone trying to keep us happy here, with lots of fake views?
Everything points in that direction...
Since I started here with an account, a bit more than a year ago, with every new image I uploaded, my first 10 - 20 views were always located in NY... always found that kind of suspect...

AI doesn't need to come back over and over or even on the site, google images are good enough. I think this site may be made in different languages. But this site is perfect for scraping there is a lot of stuff here.

Only be worried if you get no views.


----Mike Savad

mmm... I don't need views, I need sales.
On Saatchi? new image, maybe 29 views: BAM! sale...
On giphy I have (no kidding,) + 150 million views, (sometimes the double of that, they also mess arround with the views counting) never earned a dime...

You know how Redbubble makes a great deal of their profits?
Many artists there buy their own work on prints and T-shirts etc themselves, to have cheap and easy copies of their work, to give away as a present or to sell with a small profit in their own local shop...
And they also need a lot of views = a lot of traffic on their site.. They gain much more with the traffic.
I know how it works: I used to be co-owner of some kind of art site too, where we also sold prints and T-shirts..(globaldoodle: the site's now gone, but you can still find them on wikipedia and on facebook), that lived from the traffic on it, not from the sales: traffic means you can get advertisement money, even if you don't put advertisements on the site itself..
FE: Microsoft payed us to have it as a free doodling-app on X-box or Wacom payed us to say often you could easier draw on globaldoodle with a Wacom tablet etc etc..