[@Vilageidiotx] I agree that the market would eventually correct for malfeasance. That said, that doesn't mean they didn't use bots to drive their clicks up and reduce bounce percentage. The NYTs is in the business of selling ads as well as subscriptions after all. You can get pretty fancy with those bots click path and if nothing else you can make it appear that you have a smaller percentage of singletons than you really do.

I'm not saying they are definitely guilty. The source is too shady for that. But it certainly falls within the realm of possibility and it wouldn't even make the top one hundred shady things a large company has done this month.

What I would like to see confirmed is the NYT is A: banned in china and B: had a huge spike of traffic from china in a short period.