If you work in or around the film industry, there is a decent chance you have used the work of The Numbers this month, whether you realise it or not.

With only a generic “we’re rebuilding, please bear with us” message to go on, the internet responded as it always does - with confusion, anger, and conspiracy theories. One Reddit theory even suggested it was a deliberate rug pull designed to cripple the free site to push people towards paid products.

Over the past couple of years, website owners the world over have seen their web traffic change. What was initially only people browsing gave way to an ever-increasing number of bots. By 2024, automated traffic had surpassed human traffic, and just last month, Cloudflare announced that bots had reached 57.5% of web page requests.

Bruce says that only 10% of their traffic is from humans browsing the site, with the rest coming from AI bots and automated traffic.

Some of these used the site using legitimate URLs, others were looking for back doors, most likely so they could get to the data before it appeared on the site, or to manipulate the data presented to users.

In case you haven’t guessed it yet, it’s linked to prediction markets. Polymarket runs weekly markets on opening weekends, and names The Numbers as the ultimate source of truth: The ‘Daily Box Office Performance’ figures found on the ‘Box Office’ tab on this movie’s The Numbers page will be used to resolve this market once the values for the 3-day opening weekend are final.