Recall, when I registered sentechsucks.co.za and their legal firms sent me some nasty letters?

Shaun Dewberry, out of principle, at that time registered suckmywireless.co.za and fucksentech.co.za. I’ll show some solidarity and support Dewberry this time around.

He’s been served with a “takedown” notice, and given six hours to remove his “defamatory” content in the NetDynamics and Online Radio statistics lies saga.

Dear NetDynamics: Screw you. Serve me with a takedown too please. I’ve mirrored Shaun’s opinion piece at https://rodent.za.net/files/dewberry/ , including your takedown notice, and I will continue doing so in various places on the Internet until such time as you get your shit in order. A technical rebuttal is much more effective than legal threats.

Some NetDynamics network facts:

• The main portion of their “CDN” is hosted with PlusServer AG, a brand of the German company Intergenia
• This portion of the “CDN”  is a single /27 netblock (85.25.164.32) wide for a total of 32 hosts.
• Their other cdn hosts are scattered around the 188.138.0.0/17 subnet.
• All transit is by Intergenia’s AS8972, a well connected European AS.

I thus support Shaun’s argument that it is unlikely that they’re serving out to 100k+ users,  just from the size of their CDN infrastructure.

In fact, some Netflow stats from two medium sized networks (that I cannot name) show that traffic from AS8972, is <300kbps across both networks and has been for a long time. This traffic does not match with the claims made, from a pure back-of-napkin calculation, but hey, stats are always dodgy right ?

The only point that they could contend in Shaun’s assessment of their CDN is that they “anycast” their CDN IP addresses which would make it bigger than what it looks like. Some BGP lookups and traceroutes on  local public route servers show this not to be the case. And whilst it’s possible to anycast a single IP address, the typical practice is to anycast a /24 since that is the smallest size that will be generally accepted by a BGP peer, so it’s unlikely in any event.

The bottom line is that Websites and online publications have created associations  that force it’s members to use standardised measures such as Nielsens to verify readership, so that there is a verifiable baseline for online content impressions, and to verify reader uniqueness.

These organisations have not yet caught up with Internet Radio, and thus, failing a standardised measure for online listenership measurements, they’ll have to rely on the old school mechanisms that regular stations such as 702 and others use to measure listeners. The SAARF, which measures commercial and community radio listeners seems to be an option.

Ballz and 2Oceans don’t seem to feature there at all.

The only thing Netdynamics could possibly claim is that 100k+ unique IP’s have accessed their servers, and that would probably include portscans, and considering the dynamic nature of IP allocations amongst consumers. I would estimate that 10-20% of 100k IP’s are unique individuals (from experience). That would put NetDynamics served unique customers at around 10k+ unique, which seems more plausible.

The bottom line is that if a Streaming CDN is reporting listener numbers, and if a Radio station is claiming listener numbers then the basic assumption HAS to be “lies, lies, and more fucking lies” because it is in their own self-interest to inflate numbers.