A Question About Views

First of all, with the release of my new story https://www.literotica.com/s/pussy-eating-lessons-from-sis I finally eclipsed the 300 followers mark, so thank you to everyone for your continued support.

Second, I am a bit confused about how "Views" work. If, say, a particular story shows 31546 views, does that mean that 31546 people have read the story, or is the number half that but counts each page (this is a 2-pager) as a separate view? Also, with that many people reading it, why such a large gap between views and rates? I know the obvious answer is that not everyone who reads a story will rate it, but is there something else in this equation that I am ignorant of?

Thanks in advance.

My Stories: https://www.literotica.com/stories/memberpage.php?uid=3938682&page=submissions

This has been discussed many, many times on the Authors' Hangout and there is no real answer to your question.

What is certain is that 31546 people is NOT the number of people who have read the story.

Views are just that, whether the page is opened by bots or people. Even people might back-click after the first paragraph.

Ratio of votes to views? That is almost infinitely variable. There will be more votes per 1000 views for the Incest Category and fewer for Novels/Novellas.

It will also vary by author.

There's enough data available that I think we can safely make some conclusions about what a "view" is.

A view is logged every time a story is clicked on or opened.

Page views do not count as views. Whether you open a 1 page story or a 10 page story and read it through, it will be logged as one view. If that were not true, we would expect longer stories to have more views. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that's the case. We also would expect that the view to vote ratio for longer stories would get bigger, not smaller, as the number of pages increases, but in fact the ratio shrinks. That indicates that page views don't count as views, and a longer story is less likely to be finished (meaning less likely to be voted on).

There's doesn't seem to be any reason to believe that a view counts a unique reader only once. It appears to be the case that a single reader can be counted as viewing a story more than once.

There are examples of stories whose view counts almost certainly have been inflated through non-human means, through the use of bots or something like that. I don't know how to do this but many others here say it's very easy. An example is the number 1 story on the 12-month most-viewed toplist, "M." I was monitoring new stories in May and June and this story would receive tens of thousands of views one day and almost nothing the next. There's no way this viewing pattern could occur naturally with humans only.

A view doesn't mean someone's actually read the story. No one knows what the average view to read ratio is, but there are two ongoing current threads full of speculation/estimation/whatever you want to call it about this mystery.

A view means your story has been opened, but you cannot infer it has been read through to the end. Page count does not affect the view count - a one page story being opened is one view, a ten page story being opened is one view. As Ogg notes, there is no way of knowing how many people have actually finished your story.

The latest discussion is here:

https://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?t=1487508

Edit: Simon's post published while mine was being drafted...

Authors tend of forget that each time they open their own stories for whatever reason it counts as a view as well. Too bad Lit can’t filter that from the numbers nor the numbers accumulated from views that don’t yield either a vote or a comment for the story. If you only consider the votes and comments tallied against any given story as legitimate views - holy shit, then hardly any given story is getting a substantial number of views. It’s depressing to think of views in those terms.

Then again, how many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie roll tootsie pop? The world may never know. In the end, I don’t worry about view counts to my stories. What matters the most to me are those few precious and elusive yet meaningful comments. Those most definitely qualify as a view in my book.
Kant

I think the only useful data I get from the view counts on my stories is which of my stories is the most popular.

The category is critical. My incest stories have much higher view counts.

Apart from that? The title makes a real difference. My stories Virgin's Sister and Virgin's Sister Again have two 'trigger' words. My stories with 'Breast' in the title also do well.

kurrginatorX said:

why such a large gap between views and rates? I know the obvious answer is that not everyone who reads a story will rate it, but is there something else in this equation that I am ignorant of?

Click to expand...

Not everyone who views a story, i.e., clicks on the story to open it, will actually read the story to the end. This is especially true for long stories.

Not everyone who reads the story to the end will vote on it.

My current view to vote ratio for all stories is about 88:1, and that includes both standalone stories and chapters in series. The ratio varies considerably from story to story, although most of my stories are not that far from the average. The highest ratio is about 180:1, and the lowest is about 45:1.

So, out of 10,000 people that view one of my stories, the number of readers is somewhere between 10,000 and 136.

If you want to figure out what the likely number of readers is, ask yourself this: which ratio do you think is higher? The view:read ratio or the read:vote ratio? Is some who clicks on a story more likely to read it through? Or is someone who reads it through more likely to vote? Your guess about that will affect where you think the likely reader number falls. If the view:read ratio is higher than the read:vote ratio then the maximum number of readers out of 10,000 views is around 1000. But if the view:read ratio is significantly higher than the read:vote ratio then the number of readers is well over 1000. I have no idea how those ratios compare.

Okay, so now that that is settled ...

Explain bots to me. How do they know to come to this website, etc.

kurrginatorX said:

Explain bots to me. How do they know to come to this website, etc.

Click to expand...

That question would take a very long and complex answer.

But - if you set up a Google search for erotica, you will get many hits on Literotica stories, as well as a lot of stuff you should avoid. If you link that search to a program to scan the results of the search you could open a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand stories...

kurrginatorX said:

Explain bots to me. How do they know to come to this website, etc.

Click to expand...

I'm no technical expert on this subject; others here know much more. But in cases like that of the story M I don't think it's a matter of bots finding their way to Literotica as the author or a fan of the author creating a script or something similar that artificially generates views. That very likely is what happened with respect to that story.

kurrginatorX said:

Explain bots to me. How do they know to come to this website, etc.

Click to expand...

They not only come to this site, they've even written quite a few of the stories here

kurrginatorX said:

Explain bots to me. How do they know to come to this website, etc.

Click to expand...

Every major search engine have a crawler that constantly scan the Internet to discover and index content so it possibly could appear in the search results. There is a protocol (robots..txt file) that allows Web sites to give few basic instructions to them, for example forbade to explore the site, or parts of it. Not all of the robots honour those rules though.I have no idea actually, but there currently is no less than 14 extremely active search indexer bots I believe from what I have seen.

In short, if, on site where external search indexing is allowed, a post has less than twenty views, it is possible no human besides author had ever seen it.

Then, there scripts that are written to read some sites for whatever purposes. For example, one site has a script that will open every page of another site every hour, and if the content changed within the last hour, analyse it to extract and collect certain data, then use that data to generate new content and publish on its own site. Sometimes such actions create synergy, sometimes might be aggressive competition, destructive to the abused site. Legality of such actions are often questionable at best, but how I understand it, very little can be actually done about, unless it is done blatantly indeed. Because if humans are allowed to see it, and use the information in a fair way, then it is next to impossible to deny robots doing the same, even if million times faster.

For example, right next here is a thread about statistics. Of course, the data is gathered by a script. Most of it can be obtained from the listing, without opening the story itself, but it also include Flesch-Kincaid grade level that involve counting words and sentences. Obviously, that will involve request for the text and will register as view. Hopefully the researcher use his own computational power reasonably, and only calculate that once per story, not every time he update the data about view counts and such, but that may happen with lazy programming.