Everyone has at least two blind spots, they're easy to find. It's natural, that's how our eyes work.
We have mental blind spots, too. Things that our minds won't let us see unless we work hard to overcome that barrier.
Know What You Are to See Yourself Clearly
It took me a long time to accept that I'm longwinded and boring. Now that I see it, I can wear it proudly while working to do something about it.
Remember when Rumsfeld said "there are unknown unknowns" and people laughed at him? Well he was right. We all have unknowns, arenas, facades, and blind spots.
You can find your blind spots and reduce them with the Johari Window.
Let's open that window a bit to let in some fresh air and try to see the blind spot that's developed across the internet.
Over the last few years, the whole landscape has shifted and most people don't see it.
That blind spot is bot traffic on websites.
Traditionally, everyone ignores bots.
They're just these little servants that run around and index sites for search, right?
Or there's a few that are malicious and try to crack your website sometimes.
Wrong. Or at least, not anymore. That's what it was, not what it is.
And it will never be the way it used to be, ever again.
So let's look at what is.
The World Has Changed Beneath Our Feet
Bots were small in number and innocuous, helpful even, but didn't make money for websites. And websites use analytics to make money. So analytics filters out bots, because bots don't make money.
Or so the idea goes.
What used to be true is not true anymore.
I talked to a digital marketer last week and he said that he ignores bots because he can't make money from them.
I said that you actually can make bots pay you now.
He said that bots can't pay for things.
I told him bots can pay, more bots can pay every day, that they already buy tickets, collectibles, data sets, and now pay for access to websites.
He said that's not possible and hung up.
That's a blind spot, and a bad one.
The worst blind spots are ones we refuse to even consider are possible, that we can't admit to having.
Analytics hiding bots created a blind spot where websites literally can't see their bot traffic. On the occasion some slips through, they scramble to hide it again.
Ignoring Your Problem Doesn't Make It Go Away
You can ignore bots when they're a tiny portion of traffic. But how much do you have to be spending on useless traffic, bleeding your server bills, before you do something?
We analyzed one of our sites, 50% of their traffic is bots, they're spending $1k a year on that.
For a frickin bar!
Bots don't drink or listen to live music! These bots offer them nothing.
How many drinks do they have to sell to pay for that $1k they're wasting on bots?
I can tell you, they have to sell one extra drink every day they're open to subsidize the freaking bots.
Well look buddy, if you're giving away free drinks, give them to me, not a dang bot!
We looked closer. See that tiny sliver of “known bots”? 454 bots out of 10,622? Only 1.5% of that bot traffic is actually useful to their site — indexers and such.
Bots are now the majority of internet traffic and will never shrink. They will always outpace the growth of human users. Bots traffic, as a portion of your website traffic, will keep growing, and your human traffic will keep shrinking.
"[There will be] more AI agents than there are people in the world." Mark Zuckerberg, July 25, 2024
No matter how many humans you drive to your website, the bots will outpace them.
That means it's time to do something about it.
"Wololo" — Age of Empires 2, a priest converts an enemy unit to a friendly unit
Put Those Jerks to Work, Guldernit!
Stop ignoring the bots and pay attention to them. With 10,000 bots in a week, there's different segments, different purposes, different visit-intents.
Turn segments into audiences. Set up management for different audiences.
With that sheer volume of visits, we can also find ways to convert some of those audiences into payors.
Consider content scrapers. They have a business purpose, they want something specific, and what they want has financial value.
If 1/3 of reddit's revenue is from selling access to AI companies for training data… why aren't you doing that?
What if we convert 5% of the bot traffic into a payor somehow?
Monetize bots, push them through revenue funnels, and turn them into cash flow.
That's the monetization strategy for web3, standing beside ads and ecommerce for web1, and SaaS and paywalls for web2.
Maybe I'm crazy. Strike that. I know I'm crazy.
The more interesting question is, maybe I'm right?