X Elon Musk is losing credibility: record traffic during the Super Bowl is fake
According to cyber experts CHEQ, the record traffic in X, which was claimed by Elon Musk’s company during the Super Bowl, was falsified. This was reported by Mashable.
On February 11, 2024, the 58th Super Bowl took place – the final game for the title of champion of the US National Football League. This year, a 30-second slot cost $7 million.
The program is watched by an average of 100 million viewers annually. This year’s event broke records: the broadcast on CBS became the most watched television event in U.S. history. Elon Musk’s company published its own press release, calling Super Bowl LVIII one of the biggest events on the social media platform with more than 10 billion impressions and over 1 billion video views.
However, it appears that much of this traffic to X may be fake, according to data provided to Mashable by CHEQ, a leading cybersecurity firm that tracks bots and fake users.
What’s the point
According to CHEQ, 75.85% of the traffic from X to the websites of its advertising clients during the weekend of the event was fake. CHEQ’s data for this report is based on 144,000 visits to customer sites that came from X over the Super Bowl weekend, from Friday, February 9, through the end of Sunday, February 11. The data was collected from 15,000 CHEQ customers. Experts say that this is a small part of the relevant data, and it is not a scientifically valid sample, but it nevertheless shows a dramatic trend.
What else is interesting?
Small business owner Gene Marks shared the results of his advertising campaign in X with The Guardian. After spending $50 on advertising, X’s analytics showed that his site received 350 clicks with about 29,000 views. However, according to Google Analytics, X was not the source of any of the actual traffic received by his website during this time period.
According to CHEQ’s data on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok in terms of fake traffic, no other platform came close to the nearly 76% X.
- Out of more than 40 million visits to TikTok, only 2.56% were recognized as fake.
- Facebook registered 8.1 million visits, and 2.01% of them were classified as inauthentic.
- On Instagram, only 0.73% of 68,700 visits to the platform were fake.
