The human race is a minority on the Internet. And no, it\’s not because your pets have all of a sudden gotten computer-savvy.
via Less Than 40 Percent of the Internet Is Human.
What I find interesting is that while Bot activity is now 61.5% of all web traffic (an increase by 21% over 2012), only 31% of that activity is conducted by “good” bots. The remaining 30.5% is malicious activity carried out by scrapers, hacking tools, Impersonators and spammers (that last one surprisingly down 75% from 2012).
The full Incapsula report can be read here: Report: Bot traffic is up to 61.5% of all website traffic
Now I need to find a statistic that shows how much of that 38.5% human traffic is human-assisted comment spam. WordPress.com users are thankfully covered by Akismet spam blocker, which has also seen a large rise in the number of comment spam blocked during 2013. You can check your own spam statistics in your site’s Dashboard>Akismet Stats
What has your experience been this year? Have you seen an increase in the number of human-assisted spam in your site’s Spam folder? (If you need a reminder about the types of spam comments commonly posted, I heartily recommend reading Lorelle’s excellent post on “The Secret Recipe of Comment Spam“.)
If you want to read more, here’s another excellent read on comment spam: The Golden Era of Spam Comments has ended.
WPcomMaven 
At least comments can be deleted, thankfully.
I dislike that ‘thing’ on Lorelle’s post more because it is the product of a content spinner and are usually used to produce multiple versions of a blog post that can then be guest posted on different sites.
It’s yet another way to stuff the internet with more rubbish that it doesn’t need.
The only upside I guess is that if no one reads the stuff then it just sits on servers doing nothing.
Hi David, I wonder if it is financially worthwhile for someone to take up leaving human-assisted spam as a paying job. Come to think of it, that is a bit redundant because obviously it pays *someone* otherwise they wouldn’t do it. And actually it’s not true that it doesn’t do anything if it’s just sitting there. Google now penalizes a site for posting spammy links in comments. (And maybe those of us who display gravatars in comments and “likes” should be thankful that they do *not* link directly to a user’s website.)