Anomalous Spikes in Unique Listeners

[Radio Free Brooklyn]

Hello,

Starting last month, we noticed an unusual spike in unique listeners in our Centova reports. Normal growth for us has been about 10-25% month-over-month, yet in March we saw a 684% [sic] increase over February in unique listeners, and a 355% increase in listener sessions - which would be wonderful, except that we didn't see a corresponding increase in TLM. Additionally, our average session length decreased by 75%. These numbers have come down somewhat in March, but Unique Listeners are still up 160% since January, and Sessions down 50%.

The increase in unique listeners combined with the much shorter sessions would seem to indicate that there is a sudden rash of very short connections. Could this be a bot of some kind connecting to the stream? Have you ever seen anything like this before? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Support]

Hi Radio Free Brooklyn,

Yes possibly, but we do not necessarily think so. Bots or stream rippers tend to connect for abnormally long periods of time (like for over 24 hours or even days at a time) rather than just for short periods. Saying that, you do have an IP connected at present which looks a little suspicious and has been connected for 1 day and 13 hours from an "unknown" location. It seems that they are tuned in with this app that we have never come across before? https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.finallevel.radiobox&hl=en_GB

If such apps are poorly made that could "possibly" explain this if the listeners are getting disconnected all the time and are then constantly trying to reconnect? That or people are just browsing the site and tuning in and then out fairly quickly if the stream was not for them. It's hard to say for sure really.