Feed "current listeners" number wildly inflated?

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n9jth

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A feed that I often monitor typically shows about 10 current listeners. On at least two occasions over the last few days it showed 300 listeners for a short time. There was nothing noteworthy or in the news related to this agency. It's just the PD in my quiet little town. No protests, etc.

Has anyone else noticed "current listener" statistics that seem to be wildly inflated/wrong?
 

ChrisABQ

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I had a huge increase yesterday, from 80 or so to more than 300 in just a few minutes. There was a gun incident but was more or less a routine thing for my city. It makes me wonder if someone is using software to monitor Broadcastify feeds for keywords like "gun" and everyone jumps to that feed. Possible?
 

217

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I had a huge increase yesterday, from 80 or so to more than 300 in just a few minutes. There was a gun incident but was more or less a routine thing for my city. It makes me wonder if someone is using software to monitor Broadcastify feeds for keywords like "gun" and everyone jumps to that feed. Possible?
If someone posts to twitter or another site and says something like "hey check this out" with a link, immediately the numbers will increase. Seen this happen many of times on the Wide-band WebSDR radio when multiple EAM's went out over the airwaves. There is a conspiracy site were these type of links are on there daily.
 

217

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I've noticed thousands listening to an Atlanta feed, but there's almost little to no audio.
It is because the feed was monitoring only one talk group. I listened in for around five minutes and heard one call. That's when I noticed the single talk group.
 

n9jth

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Broadcastify has had record traffic over the past month with all the protests and social unrest. Lots of news listeners
While certainly true, I don't think that's the likely explanation for these sudden, brief, exponential spikes in the current listener count.
 

desertscan

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where I live theres a guy with a feed that posts fake or exaggerated news on his facebook page and listeners flock to his feed. others could be doing the same.
 

scanbc780

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@blantonl I was going to email about this as I thought it was fishy and never did sent it, but since it was brought up here... I had something like this over the last week on one of my very low listener feeds, I had something like 60 on a feed and they were all showing Firefox as clients. It was always in the morning and afternoon for like an hour or 2 and then they would all drop out. One of my other feeds did this exact same thing and they were all 5-O android listeners. Looks like it may have done it again between 7 and 11 CDT. I just thought it was weird that 99.9% were all same client over and over for several days.
 

n9jth

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I looked at the feed stats for the past week.

One morning, at 6 AM, the number of listeners spiked from zero to 300, and then back down to 1 listener, all within an hour.

Believe me, there is NOTHING happening at 6 AM for this particular department. At that hour, the night shift officers are just waking up from their naps and getting ready to go home...
 

RadioUser913

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I
A feed that I often monitor typically shows about 10 current listeners. On at least two occasions over the last few days it showed 300 listeners for a short time. There was nothing noteworthy or in the news related to this agency. It's just the PD in my quiet little town. No protests, etc.

Has anyone else noticed "current listener" statistics that seem to be wildly inflated/wrong?
I've also seen this problem, one time my feed had over 100 listeners and dropped to 1/2 in a few minutes, I live in a small town too.
 
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