[throwaway47292]

Hmm, I think the fake number will bring more money, both short and long term.

If you are selling 10_000 items, with uniform demand (just toy example), you need like 3 million unique visitors per day in order to show 'one other person is looking at this item in the last 5 minutes, (24*7)

If I show 1 + random(5) are looking at each item, my competitor has to have enormous amount of visitors to compete.

Sadly, unless its illegal to lie, organizations are disincentivized to do the right thing.

[techcode]

Oh and it's illegal to lie in those ways (deceive potential customers) just about anywhere in the world.

And though there is legally gray area - majority of that tends to clearly be not ethical...

But you know - Elon "promised" self driving cars in just a month/quarter or so - how many years ago? IIRC he even said it would be good, no not good but best investment because such a car could earn you money on it's own ...

Yet neither we got those self-driving cars, nor Elon is in trouble due to those "forward looking statements" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[techcode]

Traffic distribution is basically never uniform. Unless maybe if you've only got very very few products/pages (like just 1-5), though that definitely changes long before you reach 10_000 items.

And for the majority of mid to big websites - visitors/buyers will look only at minority of products/pages. Let's say it's like Pareto 80/20 percent principle. Though if not 90/10 - for tourism/travel/flights - because places like London, Paris [France, not dozens of them in USA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_(disambiguation)], Rome, Las Vegas, Ibiza ...etc are much, much more interesting/visited than say Anchorage/Alaska.

And unless you've got uniform spread of visitors/customers around the world - which I'm thinking that even Facebook/Google/Amazon don't really have (because Flipkart/WeChat/etc are used more in India/Chrina/etc). You're likely to see a daily (per hour), weekly (per work vs weekend days) pattern /where west is different than Israel and predominantly Muslim countries/ - the min/max difference even within one day/week is easily 2 to 5 times.

All of that is to say that by far majority of your revenue will likely be during workday afternoon in your target audiences time-zone, and from those 10_000 items it will probably be <=100 that are seen/bought by majority of your visitors.