question about the "Views" number on my story

Hi folks - my first story is online, and I have a question about some of the statistical information.

When I go to the area where you can view your submissions, for my one (and only) story The Book Tour, it is currently reading as having 4825 views... and it was only posted on Feb 24.

www.literotica.com/s/the-book-tour

Anyone know what a "view" really means? That can't possibly mean that nearly 5000 people have read that story in about a day, can it? Does the "views" number pick up a whole bunch of false hits somehow?
Just wondering - I'm assuming there's some rule of thumb where "5000 views" really means about 100 actual reads of your story, or something like that.

Thanks for any insights.
Hayes

Views are in the eye of the beholder.

spinningwheels2 said:

Anyone know what a "view" really means? That can't possibly mean that nearly 5000 people have read that story in about a day, can it? Does the "views" number pick up a whole bunch of false hits somehow?

Click to expand...

Per what I have seen on the forums, a view is actually that the story has been retrieved from the database. A multi-page story gets only one view if someone reads all the pages of it.

Yes, there are lots of people who frequent this site, so a story can easily get 5000 readers on its first day. The first day is the day a story gets its most views and it decays at a rapid rate from there.

No one really knows what "views" means here except the site owners and I haven't seen them giving an answer on that.

The only thing we know for sure is that the views are filtered. While specifics weren't mentioned, we can assume that means some types of bot/spider hits are disregarded in the number.

At the time, Laurel said the number would be "about twice" what we see, but that was years ago, and the various webcrawlers can better hide their identities now. I suspect that there are far more of those non-human hits in the view totals these days.

As best as I can calculate, using data for the same stories on a site that doesn't register a download from anyone but signed-in members and cross-referenced with both site's Alexa ranking, around 25-30% of the "views" we see are non-human activity of one type or another.

Lord knows how much more is being filtered out before the numbers we see are generated.

I've had stories generate more than 100k views in a 24 hour period before, and that's not even close to a record.

Thanks

Hi folks - well thanks for the info. Guess like many things in life, the "views" is something of a mystery.

spinningwheels2 said:

Hi folks - well thanks for the info. Guess like many things in life, the "views" is something of a mystery.

Click to expand...

Not really.

Every time the story file is opened, a 'view' is registered - even before publication. It is just program logic.

Readers can click on a story (view), decide they aren't interested, and back click.

Nothing to do with actually reading the story.