Myth: If a native source scales smoothly, it's healthy.

Myth: If a native source scales smoothly, it's healthy.

No. Suspiciously smooth is itself a fraud signature. Real human traffic is lumpy — dayparted, weekend-skewed, seasonally noisy. Bot farms deliver eerily flat hourly curves and identical session durations because that's what a script produces.

Watch for: CTR that's too consistent across placements, time-on-site clustered in a 2-second band, conversion rates that are uniform where they should vary by geo and device. Uniformity is unnatural.

Humans are messy. When your native sub-publisher's metrics look like they came out of a spreadsheet's RANDBETWEEN with a tiny variance, you're buying a server, not an audience.