WaPo, NYT, Guardian Using Chinese Bots To Fake Alexa Rank?

[aviet]

I keep an eye on the Alexa rank of news sites. Since the election I have noticed three sites: The New York Times, Washington Post and London Guardian have been receiving massive amounts of traffic from China, according to Alexa. See:

WaPo (59% Chinese traffic)
NYT (49% Chinese traffic)
Guardian (57% Chinese traffic)

 

This unexpected amount of Chinese traffic was not there previously. Going back to October 2016, Alexa showed only 2.6% of The Washington Post's traffic coming from China, a swing of over 56%. Given that Chinese traffic now accounts for ~50% or more of their Alexa rank, it is likely this Chinese traffic is covering up a considerable decline in real traffic. Other aggregators such as Similar Web show no sign of Chinese traffic.

 

Quantcast gives estimates of actual number of traffic; using those estimates as a gauge would give these three sites somewhere in the region of 30-40 million unique Chinese visitors, which would mean virtually every fairly competent English-speaking in the country is reading all three sites.

Alexa Rank is calculated from over 25,000 toolbars installed on million of computers.

[Wuzzums]

[aviet]

As an update to this, after being covered by The Gateway Pundit, Zero Hedge and others, Alexa, which is a wholly owned subsidy of Jeff Bezos's Amazon, who owns the Washington Post and keeps their likely failing finances private, have blocked the list of countries showing that four sites:

BBC
Washington Post
New York Times
London Guardian

get ~50% or more from China.

They have also changed the country where the sites are most popular from China to the US, but it also looks like they have begun filtering out the Chinese traffic, as their Alexa ranks have begun to go sideways and come down in two cases. The Alexa rank listed on the site is a three-month average to the day, so will take three months to give a better idea of how far these sites traffic have really gone down.

Soon they can take their place with the rest of the fake news, whose election cycle traffic boost was not enough, in almost all cases, to cover up a decline. Now the election cycle traffic has gone it's clear many fake news outlets have lost double-digit percentage points of traffic.