Everybody Needs Reverse Polarity

One of the biggest challenges we see in the publishing world is the impact of click farms. The name is innocuous, but it’s a big challenge for publishers because it can create some massive issues.

For those of you who don’t know, a click farm is a tactic undertaken by less scrupulous outfits who hire agencies to drive a ton of traffic to their website. It’s not “real” traffic per say, but a room full of people and computers, clicking on the same sites or stories repeatedly to artificially inflate numbers so they can create the illusion of value of using their outlets for advertising purposes.

A trained eye can spot a click farm. They tend to drive traffic during a specific timeframe and create numbers that are suspiciously high. Marketers hate the click farmers because it wastes their money. Those of us in editorial hate it because it creates an illusion of demand. An editor can waste a lot of time trying to get on trend stories, which really aren’t trends, but they didn’t know better because they looked at the competition’s numbers on face value.

We recently featured a story in our daily newsletter about Vance Brand Municipal Airport in Longmont, Colo., seeing their noise complaints soar in 2017. That’s a concern for any airport, but when they drilled down into the numbers, airport leaders found 825 complaints were filed by one man alone.

That’s right, one man alone complained about noise at the airport on average 2.26 times each day. Now I’m someone who isn’t afraid to file grievance, but 2.26 times per day on the same topic almost puts a Russian bot targeting social media posts to shame.

One man put his thumb on the scales hard enough he almost tipped the conversation. Had that information not been shared correctly with the media, it would make the issue look much worse than it might seem and create headaches for the airport that might not be as big as they really are.

We live in an age of data, so it’s more important than ever to get to the granular level and sharing the information with the public so you don’t get trapped in a situation that doesn’t represent reality. It’s the best defense you have against spending time and resources fighting an issue not as dire as it may seem.