Video Banners & Bandwidth

Just noticed today that a few banners we produced had not been tested sufficiently… The thing was this: We produced a banner with a video ad. Now in Finland, none of the mainstream sites accept that any video-banners be streamed from their servers (in fear of bandwidth congestion), so we had to create a banner that essentially says "Click me to play the video" and after user interaction would start streaming the flv from one of our servers. As it turned out, the banner had a *slight* flaw and would actually start downloading the video instantly (but not display it).

Well, what happens when a banner on three major sites download a video from our servers the instant it appears?

A whopping 178 Gigabytes of traffic over just two days! Luckily our server at Magenta Sites didn’t even cough (thanks guys for the great service!).