I've noticed for a long time that some sites I visit (even non-dodgy ones) have ads of a dubious nature along the lines of

"Young females of a socially generous bent looking for intimate male companionship in..." followed by either real suburb names in Perth or else even the actual suburb I'm in.

I don't think a single one of these sites has been Australian.

I knew that IP addresses could be narrowed down to countries & institutions & even individuals if someone's willing to go to that much effort - but surely IP addresses don't indicate to the broader internet your local suburb?

How is it that the purveyors of these dodgy ads are able to tailor them so by indicating the person browsing's locality to such a degree of precision?

I think it's more the location of your ISP (Or the location of their equipment).

I've never had Wellington, but I have had Brisbane (location of Veridas before they went kaput) and then Wollongong (WCG) and now I get Mudgee (no idea how that one happens)

I've never had 'smart ads' pin point where I'm at by IP, often my IP seems to link to cities 10-25 miles away.

Many ISPs use a certain range of IPs for a specific area/region and may include additional info via hostname if the ISP truely dedicates IPs across the cities/towns. If your ISP doesn't recycle IPs elsewhere there is a better chance of 'smart ads' being accurate, other times ISPs are lazy and tie all their IPs to major cities of nearby suburbs to keep it simple or location of the corp offices.
There are some exceptions to hostname= location, if you tether with a phone/data card, VerizonWireless, at&t/Cingular, Rogers/Fido etc will point the hostname to their wireless division HQ address.(at&t/Cingular for example will point to Fort Worth TX, VerizonWireless will point to Reston VA, etc)

This is how an internal stat tracker I use lists visitor info, a good example of how it may display hostname details being linked to a city/state or prov(last digits of IPs are removed for privacy reasons):
Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada
CPE001310eceea1-CM0014049489ec.cpe.net.cable.rogers.com (99.237.66.xxx)

Toronto, Ontario, Canada
74.12.14.xxx -this ISP doesn't have a detailed hostname

Phoenix, Arizona, United States
ip68-3-189-xxx.ph.ph.cox.net (68.3.189.xxx)

Raleigh, North Carolina, United States
cpe-098-026-088-xxx.nc.res.rr.com (98.26.88.xxx)

Maidenhead, England, United Kingdom
host81-149-55-xxx.in-addr.btopenworld.com (81.149.55.xxx)

Paris, Ile-de-france, France
cre71-1-82-246-160-xxx.fbx.proxad.net (82.246.160.xxx)

I've seen Telstra/Bigpond & Optus have IPs which break down their hostname by province then city/suburb. Hope these examples give some insight of how much info is listed between some service providers

Delete all your browser cookies and watch all the advertising become dumb again. But otherwise, there's a lot of geo-location possible now with IP addresses. I can tell what percentage of people from different cities in Australia visit MacTalk for instance.

Care to share that knowledge for the curious ones of us out there??

Agreed, It would be interesting to know browser and OS stats too.

i'm not in Perth but whenever i visit a torrent search engine, it tells me that some young slapper in Perth wants to change my oil. My ISP is Perth based.

As for IP address location...

The isp I worked for had a regional segmentation for each of the hubs, we'd have local nodes with the area they served, semi-local UBR's that would say they were in Liverpool, Camden, Croydon, Edinburgh, Dundee for example - then they would pass that traffic on to semi regional GSR's. Every bit of ISP kit told everything it is connected to where it is generally. We'd see customers reporting problems on UBR06live cable 3/0 upstream 3 and know the area affected.

Feb 7 -> March 8, 2008 stats for Australia.





The total is 167,603.

Far out. I can't have much hope for the future of the site when Cranbourne is in the top 10. :P

And Nerang! Bloody hell!

Impressive stats none the less... I like the representation too!

Blame Telstra, quite a bit of their IP range has no reverse DNS set, hence the "Not set".

Come on Melbourne! Let's make Number 1.

Shut up Every one of those ads I get say I'm from Nerang (I'm not, but about 10 mins away...) so I suppose I'm glad to see I made top 10!

Would "Nerang" include everyone from the Gold Coast, such as Surfers Paradise where Silverdreamer is located?