Lots of “Other” plays seem to be Amazon AWS

  • Resolved Ben Curtis

    (@iambencurtis)


    6 years, 8 months ago

    Our podcast recently switched to using SSP and Castos hosting. While viewing the stats for the first episode released using SSP, I noticed that there were a large number of “Other” plays being reported. Being the nosey person I am, I decided to creep around the database to see what was going on. I found in the ssp_stats table a list that included post_id, IP, referrer, and date. For a large number of the entries, the referrer field was blank and had some of the same IP repeated over and over. I did a lookup for a few of those IP’s and they came back with something similar to the following:

    52.198.185.141 -> ec2-52-198-185-141.ap-northeast-1.compute.amazonaws.com

    What would be causing this to be? I have a spider-sense of sorts that Castos is actually using AWS, but why would that cause our listening stats to be inflated and largely useless?

    Other than the stats being not centralized (having some information only available while in an episode edit screen for example) and not quite as informative as I’d like in general, I do really like this plugin. I especially like the way that uploads don’t require me to leave my site backend. Thanks!

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)

  • For the next week or so we’re doing some upgrading of our analytics module and during that time we’re going to be adding not only the total listens across your entire podcast (and by episode) but also geographic distribution and device/app type that people are listening on.

    During this time the layout of the Analytics are will be a bit different, but do trust that all of the data is still there and shortly we’ll have things back to the normal layout that you were accustomed to.

    Thread Starter Ben Curtis

    (@iambencurtis)

    All of that sounds great! But that does not explain the spike in compute.amazonaws.com entries I found, or how a podcast that is not that popular as of yet to have over 100 listens in 1 day when before was lucky to have 25 on a good day. I am not knocking the plugin in any way, I would just like some clarity.

    Plugin Author Craig Hewitt

    (@podcastmotor)

    Hi Ben,

    Thanks for the question and additional details here with respect to the Other category in SS Stats. As you said we do use AWS as the backend for Castos hosting so that does make sense, but I’m not sure why there would be an unusually large number of pings to your show because of this. We’re investigating this further and will let you know what we come up with.

    Craig

    Thread Starter Ben Curtis

    (@iambencurtis)

    Is there any update on why numbers seem wonky, or on the addition of more stats to the plugin or backend of Castos?

    Thread Starter Ben Curtis

    (@iambencurtis)

    Marco?

    Bump-o.

    Plugin Author Craig Hewitt

    (@podcastmotor)

    HI @iambencurtis

    Thanks for the bump and the nudge on this. We have been working pretty extensively on a completely new analytics platform for Castos which we’re hoping to start rolling out in the next week or so. After we’re done with this push we’ll turn our focus more towards the SS Stats module and what could be causing the unwanted AWS entries.

    Will definitely let you know how it’s going as we get closer to both of these.

    Craig

    Thread Starter Ben Curtis

    (@iambencurtis)

    This is not meant to be another bump (thank you for your last response) I just thought that some things I found while looking into some server logs might possibly be useful.

    The user agent for those AWS compute hits is listed as “python-requests/2.18.4”
    The status of the request is always 304.
    The method is always HEAD.

    I’m not sure if any of that will actually be of any use to you, but it was some new information I just found.

    Plugin Contributor Jonathan Bossenger

    (@psykro)

    Hello @iambencurtis I’d like to dig into this issue with you so that we can determine the cause and get it resolved.

    Could I ask you to please email [email protected] (marked for my attention), as I may need to request site login details etc to be able to help you get this resolved.

    Regards

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
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