Just hit 50,000 views on a video and realized half were from a single bot farm

I was excited about my video hitting 50,000 views until I checked the location data. Turns out 25,000 of those views came from three IP addresses in one building in Mumbai. Has anyone else noticed big chunks of their stats coming from weird places?

3 comments

3 Comments

theas2811d ago

Honestly, I'm gonna push back on that. A whole building using the same IP to watch one video? That's not how college campuses or offices work, they usually have a range of IPs for different departments or dorms, not one single address for 25,000 views. And if it was a VPN, you'd see a spread of locations, not three IPs clustered together in one place. You'd have to have a pretty specific setup to make that many views look like they're all coming from the same building in Mumbai, and it points way more to a bot farm than a shared network.

pat_murray5311d ago

But isn't it possible those are just office workers or a college campus watching on the same network? Happens all the time with shared IPs lol.

charles72011d ago

Idk, I saw this article the other day about how VPNs and things like that can make IP addresses look like they're coming from totally different places. Might be a bunch of people using stuff like that to watch from different spots. Plus, maybe it's just me but I feel like data analysts who track this stuff usually account for shared IPs in their reports. So if they're flagging it, there's probably something else going on.