WTF 0 - 60,000 uniques in one day?
 

I have a tubesite I set up recently, its a legal tube paysite. I have been struggling trying to get traffic for months and only get around 15 hits a day, total of 12 serp results in 3 months.

Yesterday I get 60,000 visits, almost all from the UK with a few from random other countries.

Today I got 50,000 again and its barely 12 o'clock.

WTF is going on? I see in google analytics there are about 4,000 tube sites linking to me but I cant find my link on any of them. Is it an attack, or real traffic?

People are hitting my signup form, signing up for Fling from the banner ad, but i have no idea why so many all at once.

Ideas?

Are these 4000 tube sites embedding your video or hotlinking it? Though since it is a legal tube you are probably embedding sponsor vids so I guess that wouldn't be it.

check your latest referrers.

be happy? heh my legal tube is getting shit from google

They are hosted vids that I own the license for. I cant find anything I recognize embedded though. How can I find out exactly what page is linking to me? Seems all I get form google analytics are the domains.

let me know if you need any help thanks

Check the raw access logs.

Often under /var/log/httpd/ or other such places depending on the distribution and set up. Hopefully you have Apache configured to report the referrer within the access log. If not, fix it so it does.

What about paid signups?
Got them? If not it's probably hotlinking or kind of attack, don't know for sure...

I got about 80 join hits but no signups, got 14 free signups to Fling on a geo-targetted skyscraper. at least some of the traffic appears to be real humans, I still cant find the referal links that are sending all this traffic though.

I am also getting a lot of type-ins for some reason over 800 of them.

I would love to think this is good news and I did something right, but somehow, I doubt it.

probably the feds.

:1orglaugh

Weird that the majority of the traffic is UK, are your hosted vids watermarked with your url?

yeah maybe they showed your url on coronation street.

somebody is jacking your band

Yeah, no shit congrats mate

someday I'll get better at reading logs, but for now it looks like whatever it was, its over. Traffic is back down to its old slowness.

Install Google Analytics, it will tell you everything.

you didnt have a stat tracker installed?

I was gonna guess that it was embeds as well.

Sounds like an embed.

OK this is definitely not over, but I did get a paid signup from it now. SO it may not be a bad thing. I am using Barefootsies Mechbunny script and it looks like the inline ads are being passed along with the embed, which I have set yup to provide a Nats join link that goes straight to CCBill and also I have the domain name in the inline ad, so I am getting about 1500 type-ins a day. (I'm up to 300,000 uniques a day now - all USA and Western Europe)

The only thing I don't know is how my bandwidth bill is going to work out. I've used 63 GB in the last 3 days.

you need to hire an intelligent webmaster :2 cents:

hahahahahah jesus christ, i needed a good laugh, thankyou :P

That's like what? 600gig's in a month? That's absolute peanuts when It comes to BW bill.

When you launch a tube site like that you will get sites like the OV Guide linking to it and a few others which I wont mention. There is another big site which will send you a shit load of hits because it tells people how to download your tube videos and believe me its very popular You will also most prob get a french site which normally links to tube sites and sends you a shit load of french traffic.

The uk traffic im not sure about but I do know that this happens cause I had exactly the same thing when I launched my tube and because its diff/long content it gets picked up a lot quicker :2 cents:

Nice. Well I am going to enjoy the traffic then.

I may be stupid but I don't think Halfpint was giving you good news there?

Update:

Well I finally got that sorted, it was a virus on my Windows 7 that ESET did not catch. I changed to Kaspersky which detected there was an issue but did not get rid of it. I side-stepped the issue by switching to my mac for awhile.

The virus used filezilla (I think) to silently upload its payload to any site that was in the site manager.

Once in there it set up its malware thing and a cron job that would rebuild the payload every 10 minutes in case it was taken down.

As soon as the payload was in place I guess the botnet behind the virus sent massive loads of traffic to infect as many browsers as possible. Hence the 300k visits a day.

From the injected php code Konrad, who helped me slay the beast discovered that the hacker uses the handle Fatigue, and that is his login at his stats site, bombastats.com. Looks like he changed his login now though cause it doesn't work any more. There was a stats page in there showing how many browsers he had infected, it looked really nice and professional but I couldn't make out too much because it was all in a Russian-looking alphabet.

Now that the virus is gone, stats have completely normalized. While the attack was going on I got thousands of views on each of my videos, 2 paid signups and a paid join on Fling.

I really hope that this virus traffic is just really low quality because I hate to think that with almost exactly 1 million unique visits I would make less than $100. I am guessing targeted traffic would be worth more.

I can't imagine traffic to a free video site being so horrible. I mean when I want an Xbox 360 my first stop is the free Xbox 360 website but I still plan to buy someday.

It's a paysite.

It's getting very difficult to secure a Windows system these days using a conventional set up. Even if you keep one or two anti-malware utilities updated and set them to scan each night you're still at risk. Imagine if the malware author had made his code more intelligent so that it did not tip you off so much by the abnormal traffic. He might still have free run on your server.

good thing you got the answer now. That load was definitely not normal.

Yeah, actually it was google reporting it as an attack site that tipped me off. If it had not been for that I would have never known.

I think a lot of site owners don't understand how serious the threats are...

They let me know too, once upon a time. Get in the habit of viewing the source code of several of your pages each day (not your local dev copies, but view source of the live pages) to see if there is anything in there that shouldn't be.