What causes these listener spikes?

[HiVolt]

Does anyone know what causes these abnormal listener spikes? My streams do not have high listener counts, betwen 5-20 at any given time unless there is some event happening, and every now and then I notice these weird spikes. Today I was surprised to have over 100 listeners for over 4 hours, and when checking the stats it said between 95-100 of these were listed as Chrome browser.

 

[AB5ID]

Same here.

 

[Reconrider]

Bots from other websites
Scanner apps using tags to trick listeners

 

[Deziel0495]

I've also noticed with the scanner radio app, any listener can alert of a breaking event, whether it's happening or not and once the feed breaks a certain listener threshold there will be a banner displayed of said breaking event they chose, similar to how you can issue alerts on your own feed.

I seen feeds with this type of "alert" issued, listened in and there is absolutely nothing happening. Happened to my feed as well.

 

[AB5ID]

Could this be remedied by allowing just one IP address to represent one listener?

 

[buddrousa]

NEWS EVENTS or News Agencies looking for news in prime hours.

 

[vagrant]

That would not be a good thing. See your thread about this for my reply.

Could this be remedied by allowing just one IP address to represent one listener?

 

[AB5ID]

That would not be a good thing. See your thread about this for my reply.

Thanks!

 

[blantonl]

We don't track listener IP addresses, so it would be a major project to start doing so.

There are bots, misbehaving browser clients, proxies, and a zillion other reasons why we see spikes in listener counts sometimes. We're aware of the "issue" and we're constantly evaluating ways to better represent true listener counts. But I wouldn't worry about it too much.

 

[rcool101]

I had a spike for 2 days now. It was Dalvik Audio Core 2.1 (Android). 97 last night and 95 today. Put me in the top 50 feeds. I disconnected for 1 minute and reconnected. Back to normal now