Barry O'Sullivan

speaker

108 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 14 Aug

Barry O'Sullivan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Taking Stock · Circular economy, 'dead internet' theory & blockchain revolution · 14 Aug 2026 podcast

Well it's a very interesting tipping point really, isn't it, that the that the uh month of traffic that's due to human beings is now in the minority online.

I think it means a number of things.

Um as you said in your introduction, I think the original concept of the internet was that it was a place where people could come and talk about ideas, they could um they could share content.

Um I think there was an expectation that it would be this safe place for free speech and so on.

Um but of course over

last number of years we've seen that um the internet as a concept has changed somewhat it's uh it's not primarily an attention economy you know people are basically been you know they're on social media platforms whose primary objective is to engage you through advertising and so on.

And given that most traffic is now um artificial in a sense, um it really does change the the dynamic and the extent to which actual human beings will engage.

For example

If you're um for example, g go on any social media platform of your choice, um, you'll see that there's um a lot of pushback and negative commentary from accounts that do look like they're bot accounts.

And of course a consequence of that is that actual people will disengage from the conversation and and it no longer becomes that sort of safe place where people can really comment and share their ideas.

Yeah, so it it certainly does impact the um the integrity of those kind of analytics.

So does an a lot more work is needed to understand whether the traffic is from actual human beings, you know, or if it's from bots and that's uh that can be difficult and not impossible to police.

So certainly um your good old fashioned um metrics of engagement and click through and all these types of things, um, they can be corrupted and so

you know, if you're if you're trying to uh measure the impact of your marketing campaign or understand, you know, what is it on your in on your website that's genuinely getting engagement, that can be compromised.

And that's that's a problem obviously.

They will, absolutely.

But I I think also um we'll need to know something about um n not only does this apply to to to analytics but it applies to the web more generally because you know, we really do need to know, you know, who are the actual people and how are actual real people engaging with each other and engaging with content and um and messaging because um this can be y you know, uh I think everybody has seen examples where

You know, there might be a news story or a um a commercial announcement um that might be of a sensitive nature or whatever.

Um and it gets a huge amount of pushback.

And a lot of the pushback it gets is not from actual human beings.

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