Bogus High Listeners Data

[Oakland_Tower]

I run 3 feeds. 2 of the feeds normally have fewer than 10 listeners at any one time. However within the last 2 months or so all 3 feeds showed an unusually high number of peak listeners (100-200) that seemed to last for just a few minutes. When I play back the archives I can't find any big incident that would draw this many listeners. Is this something that Broadcastify engineers do to test the system on a random basis...jam the servers to see if they can take it? Any ideas?

 

[IcomIcR20]

I noticed that too... this evening my feed that I just put online yesterday spiked up to nearly 40 listeners for a few minutes and the went back down to 8 (which is what it usually is give or take).

 

[rcool101]

Mine has done it 3 times in the last 3 weeks with Jan 2 being the highest...266 when it was prolly 26

 

[bemyax]

I have Scanner Radio set to alert on high listener counts. A nearby rail feed usually has a couple of listeners. When I got an alert yesterday that over 300 were tuned in, I was, "Yeah. Right." Even though I get right on these alerts in case something is happening, the listener number does not reflect the apparent alert level.

 

[mule1075]

I noticed that too... this evening my feed that I just put online yesterday spiked up to nearly 40 listeners for a few minutes and the went back down to 8 (which is what it usually is give or take).

Not unusual for a new feed. Especially if you have scanner radio alert you when new feeds are added. People want to check it out and see if they are interested.

 

[lukemester]

I've noticed that the listeners reported on the management page lags behind the current number of listeners. I can get an alert but only see a small number of users. Eventually, the listener number catches up. The statistics graph will show the spike.


Whenever I get an alert there's allways been something happening on the feed.

 

[blantonl]

Daily listeners are updated at the end of the day... not continuously...

 

[Oakland_Tower]

Daily listeners are updated at the end of the day... not continuously...

Can you comment please on the thrust of this thread...why there seems to be false high number of listeners being reported?

 

[blantonl]

"Thrust of this thread?" - That's, uh, pretty graphic

The answer is, I don't know. The past two weeks have seen millions of people activate new smart phones, download new apps, and generally use Broadcastify more than any other time in the history of the business (other than major events) . My guess would be we're seeing a lot of curious traffic across the board.

 

[nh_handyman]

Twice in the past week my listener count has had peaks close to 400. My normal peak for any 24 hour period is 8 to 10.
Just now I noticed it was a little high (32) and I started to listen - nothing going on .

The stats page jumped the number to 376, then to 341 - now back to 133 and dropping (within the span of 10 minutes).

This is a small Town police feed with lots of dead air time.

Has the stats engine been worked on as of late or did that episode of Northwood Law on Animal Planet that included a search in Merrimack, NH air and is being rebroadcast once in a while? (I don't get the station, I can't check)

Thanks,
p.s. now back to the normal under 10 listeners

 

[ibagli]

I've been having this too. My normal is 50-100 depending on the time of day, but there have been several uncharacteristic spikes above 200 or 300 that immediately go back to normal by the next hour (a real increase in listeners usually tapers off more gradually than that).

 

[nh_handyman]

Its nice to know its just not me ;-)

I was hoping though that there was some tweak to the way the current listener count was being generated that was causing this.

I can usually attribute a count to 100 or so to a long-lived police activity in the community getting posted to social media (there are a few cases of that) but these high spikes I initially thought, as I hinted at, were due to a national broadcast of a search that was recorded in our community over the summer by the Northern Law film crew. I guess that isn't the case

Thanks everyone.

 

[flythunderbird]

"Thrust of this thread?" - That's, uh, pretty graphic

The answer is, I don't know. The past two weeks have seen millions of people activate new smart phones, download new apps, and generally use Broadcastify more than any other time in the history of the business (other than major events) . My guess would be we're seeing a lot of curious traffic across the board.

I concur. Both of my feeds have seen an uptick in traffic just since Christmas. I just hope that it stays long-term.

 

[bctrainers]

I've seen this issue on my scanner feed since mid to late 2017. Sometimes the spikes are between 50 to 100 additional, other times more than 100 phantom listeners. There is no pattern to the listen spikes, it's absolutely random.

It's always one user-agent at a time reporting the absurdly high count then rapidly tapers off... but each time the spikes happens, it's a different user-agent type. It's quite bizarre.

 

[Oakland_Tower]

I've seen this issue on my scanner feed since mid to late 2017. Sometimes the spikes are between 50 to 100 additional, other times more than 100 phantom listeners. There is no pattern to the listen spikes, it's absolutely random.

It's always one user-agent at a time reporting the absurdly high count then rapidly tapers off... but each time the spikes happens, it's a different user-agent type. It's quite bizarre.

I didn't realize it was the same user agent. By the time I notice it, the count is back to normal. I just wonder if the engineers are doing this to test the traffic handling of various feeds on a random basis.

 

[Oakland_Tower]

Today I received another bogus high. At 1655 local time I hit an all time high of 265. The next hour it was down to a reasonable 50. So over 200 listeners dropped out in 5 minutes? Seems unlikely. There was stuff going on but nothing that would drive this many listeners and then suddenly drop off.

 

[Oakland_Tower]

Today I received another bogus high. At 1655 local time I hit an all time high of 265. The next hour it was down to a reasonable 50. So over 200 listeners dropped out in 5 minutes? Seems unlikely. There was stuff going on but nothing that would drive this many listeners and then suddenly drop off.

And it happened again - went from 20 to almost 200 and then back to 20 just a few minutes before 1700 hrs local time. Very strange.

 

[Oakland_Tower]

And it happened again - went from 20 to almost 200 and then back to 20 just a few minutes before 1700 hrs local time. Very strange.

And again just now. Went from 20 to 99 and back to 20 in about 10 minutes. I was able to see the breakdown as it was cranking up and only the 5-o radio iOS was increased (from say 10 to 89. Somethings up. Interesting that today's and Wednesday's event took place just before 0000 UTC.

 

[Linkero]

And again just now. Went from 20 to 99 and back to 20 in about 10 minutes. I was able to see the breakdown as it was cranking up and only the 5-o radio iOS was increased (from say 10 to 89. Somethings up. Interesting that today's and Wednesday's event took place just before 0000 UTC.

It is pretty interesting that both events happened nearly at the same time.

I have scanner radio on my android phone, and just had a similar experience happen. I have it set to alert when feeds within 50 miles of me have more than 200 people. Baltimore county ended up popping up. Not even 10 seconds after I had clicked, it dropped down to ~40. Checked local news and various twitter accounts, and it's essentially just a normal day.

Since stress testing hasn't been confirmed, I speculate whether this is due to a web crawler(search engine). Although, in my experience, I have never seen a crawler open up so many connections simultaneously. I'm interested to find out what exactly is causing these false numbers

 

[Oakland_Tower]

My son tells me that stress testing is unlikely as today's servers should not be stressed out by digital audio feeds. Now I'm wondering if this is a marketing thing. As mentioned above, alerts go off (for those who have set them in their app), people fire up their app and read the ads.