The Most Profitable New Reader Demographic: Robots

Here is the weirdest thing about the modern Web: humans are only one constituency and maybe not the most profitable one. Consider the case of an anonymous publishing executive who spoke with the media trade magazine Digiday about purchasing bulk robot traffic to his former company's website. By robot, I mean software that is designed to simulate a human being browsing the Web. Bots, as they are known, are relatively easy to create, and now you can easily purchase their services to build a nice business, if you are willing to bend the rules of digital publishing.