Is referral spam worth solving?

First off, we are a team of senior research engineer and scientist working for a major research institute in Singapore. We have been trying to figure out if the referral spam problem is worth solving since 2 months ago. We ourselves feel the pain but we are not sure if people in general are interested in eliminating this problem. In fact, our research data has shown that referral spam is evolving into what we call web traffic spam. Web traffic spam includes many types of fake or useless web traffic that does nothing but bring irritation and pain to site owners.

What do you think? Is web traffic spam worth solving?

We would really like to know your opinion! To help people estimate the problem of web traffic spam on their site, we have build a tool to help them analyze their Google Analytics web traffic. If you are interested, you can try this out here.

We think that people are only beginning to realize the existence of this problem in recent years because almost everyone is using some form of analytics on their site. In the past, these type of traffic spam remains hidden in the dark with no tools to accurately help detect or manage them. Today, we have technology to detect them but no real way to manage them. We are posting this question to try and gather opinions to show our management that this web traffic spam problem is worth solving and investing research into. And hopefully, we also want to bring the technology to market as a startup.

For a start, we think education about web traffic spam is important. Hence, if you would like to know more about our findings with regard to web traffic spam, you can visit our project site for our Hall of Shame list or read more technical findings on our blog. We hope to hear from you and continue the conversation…