You Sometimes You Gotta Wonder....

I think I read somewhere recently that AOL gets around 6 million searches a day (please correct me if I'm wrong)

You Sometimes Gotta Wonder.....

I'm a pretty light scrapebox user but still probably do about 2000 of those AOL searches each day just because I'm too lazy to uncheck the "AOL" button on scrapebox

If there's 1000 scrapebox users like me (complete guess), who do 2000 searches a day each, that's about 2 million searches a day, or 1/3 of AOL's total search traffic....

All because we're too lazy to uncheck "AOL" when harvesting.......

Yeah, I think you are so right. For competitive terms--it doesn't matter what search engine it is--a lot of the traffic is from automated software, like Scrapebox and thousands of others. I know that the engines are supposed to filter it all out, but realistically, how can they do it? With Scrapebox on private rotating proxies,it would be almost impossible to eliminate traffic like that from their stats. This is why I think it is important to strongly discount any stats you see before you take on a new niche. I always ask myself this, "if it turned out that 90% of the traffic to this niche wasn't actual human buyers, would I still like the niche?" A lot of times, 90% of the traffic is automated bots and you can have the best landing page in the world at the #1 Serp and still not get much of a conversion rate. If your niche only has 1,000 monthly searches, that might mean only 3 real people a day search your term and of those, only some fraction will click and convert. So be careful of those low traffic niches!

I'm not necessarily talking about niches, etc. - this is more the stuff that goes up to nielsen ratings, the news, shareholders, CEO's, etc

I'm pretty much trying that what we do has a good chance of skewing the "everyday" stats we see in a major way

look at it this way - last 4-5 years, facebook's been growing like crazy. Like adding 100 million people a year

However it seems like they've been stalled at the 500 million mark for like what? the past 9-10 months almost?

Notice that approximately that's been about the time they've been clamping down harder on spam accounts? They probably just rode the fake account train up to a saleable level then started to cut it off.

let's say that you have 2000 people that make 100 facebook accounts a day (I don't think that's an unreasonable estimate) - that's 200,000 accounts a day, 70 million a year

if 50% of those get canned, you're still around 35 million fake accounts a year

over 4 years, that's 140 million fake accounts, or 28% of users on what they frequently quote as their "user base"