July is usually a quieter month for web traffic but Commsrisk bucked that trend this year. All of the articles listed in this chart generated levels of traffic that were well above the norm. Traffic for the Global Fraud Dashboard has continued to rise as a growing number of external sites are linking to it, and this is drawing more eyeballs to other content too. However, the levels of attention paid to the top few stories were extraordinary, and must be due to the specific topics they addressed, which almost never receive proper coverage anywhere else. These articles will almost certainly feature in the year-end countdown of the most popular Commsrisk stories of 2025.
I typically devote a few sentences ahead of each monthly top ten to some brief analysis of the factors that drive traffic to this website. It gives me perverse pleasure to see that almost none of my closest competitors acts upon the advice I give away for free. As Benjamin Franklin observed: “experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other”. The funny thing about the web is that the only way to learn from experience is to examine the data about how people arrive at a website. My experience of working with various vendors and associations is that they all want more attention but few take the time to examine the data about who is visiting their website. They instead trust the free advice given in naff generalist articles about online marketing even though it may have no relevance to the behavioral patterns of their existing audience. It tickles me to see so many people who claim to know about electronic communications and monetizing data also adopt flawed online publicity strategies because they do not use their own website to learn about the best measures of engagement and how to improve them.
The data about the sources of traffic for the top Commsrisk articles during July neatly illustrate how so many theories about maximizing an online audience are bunk. For example, LinkedIn is a modest source of web traffic if you have a well-rounded strategy for obtaining traffic from other sources too. The overt measures of success on LinkedIn are not even reliable indicators of how many will click through. “Chinese Tourist Caught Driving Smishing SMS Blaster around Oman” received double the number of impressions and likes on LinkedIn compared to “X-ploring the Privacy Risks with Somos’ HLR Query Service” but more people clicked through to Commsrisk from the LinkedIn post about the latter. It is also clear which article people spent more time thinking about: the average time spent reading the Somos article was more than three times the average for the Oman article. Sometimes the appearance of popularity that comes from a ‘like’ is far less important than addressing a topic that the audience cares about, even if some readers choose not to signal their interest to the rest of the world.
The way these two articles acquired traffic was radically different. Visitor numbers for the Somos article peaked heavily on the day it was published, but subsided more rapidly afterwards. The peaks were especially sharp around the times when people start work in Europe and North America. Most of the traffic came from people who entered the URL of the article directly into their browser. These are indicators that the article went viral in a way that I cannot directly measure because people were sending emails and direct messages to tell their peers to read it, prompting many to click through to the page when they received the message. In contrast, this is not the kind of article that generates much traffic through Google searches. The Oman article overtook the Somos article in this chart because it has sustained interest over a longer period, and still accumulates a good number of visitors each day. This is to be expected from an article covering a topic which concerns the general public and professionals who work outside the comms sector more than the insiders who have often neglected the risk of SMS blasters because they cannot work out how to monetize controls to stop them.
The Oman article generated more traffic through web searches, but Reddit was also a decisive factor in separating the two articles at the top of the charts. Almost no risk management insiders working in the comms sector think of Reddit as a potential audience but it can be a massive contributor of traffic when a topic captures the imagination of people with a broader interest in consumer affairs or cybersecurity. It was the traffic from Reddit that ultimately secured the top spot for the article about an SMS blaster arrest in Oman.
The following rundown is ranked by the number of views for each page during July.
- Chinese Tourist Caught Driving Smishing SMS Blaster around Oman
- X-ploring the Privacy Risks with Somos’ HLR Query Service
- 50 Customers of French Bank Hit by Insider SIM Swap Scam
- Why Is ChatGPT Giving HLR Data about Your Phone to Anyone Who Asks for It?
- Researchers Use Leaked Data to Demonstrate SMS Fraud and SS7 Surveillance
- Irish Regulator Defends A2P SMS Registration after Scam Warnings Are Attached to Genuine Messages
- Rethinking PRINS: Why 5G SA Roaming Security Needs a Smarter Path to 6G
- Why the UK’s SIM Swap Statistics Cannot Be Trusted
- South Korean Police to Run Telco and Financial Fraud Center on a 24/7/365 Basis
- “Likely Scam” Warnings Added to Irish SMS Messages with Unregistered Sender IDs from Today
