In late January and early February 2021, many bloggers started seeing analytics referral spam from "trafficbot" sources and hitting non-existent pages on the site also called various versions of "trafficbot".
Several hosts investigated and confirmed that this traffic is NOT hitting servers, so we can confirm that this specific traffic is only analytics referral spam.
Analytics referral spam is not dangerous to your standing with the ad partners, as it is not actual traffic hitting your server and generating ad impressions.
It does impact your RPM calculation but does not impact your revenue or earnings.
If you'd like to filter this traffic out, you can do so by following the instructions in this blog post.
Making this change should adjust your historical data in your Google Analytics, but it will not impact the data that's been synced to your Mediavine Dashboard.
If you'd like to manually calculate your RPM for the days that you experienced the surge in referral spam, use the following formula:
Total Traffic - Bot Traffic = Adjusted Traffic
EARNINGS / Adjusted Traffic * 1000 = Correct RPM