What do you consider to be a more accurate representation of reads?

HeyAll

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Let's say your story has 10,000 views and a 100 votes.

In your opinion, how many people have actually read it (either word-for-word or skimmed) all the way to the end? Thousands? Or hundreds?

I've always wondered this.

Personally, I lean towards votes being more accurate. I think it's like on-demand or netflix where people mostly watch a few minutes then check-out.

In addition, people do re-read hot stories (readers constantly state this). And a lot of people don't vote. I know that I watch tons and tons of youtube videos and I've never voted or given a thumbs up.

So with the states listed above, I'd say several hundred people have actually read the whole thing, and if it's a good hot story, there will be people re-reading it over the years.

I also think that when a story is 'old' it will have less votes, even when people read it for the first time. I think people will be less inclined to vote on old stories because it might seem pointless to them.

Those are just opinions.

Thoughts?
 
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Let's say your story has 10,000 views and a 100 votes.

In your opinion, how many people have actually read it (either word-for-word of skimmed) all the way to the end? Thousands? Or hundreds?

I've always wondered this.

Personally, I lean towards votes being more accurate. I think it's like on-demand or netflix where people mostly watch a few minutes then check-out.

In addition, people do re-read hot stories (readers constantly state this). And a lot of people don't vote. I know that I watch tons and tons of youtube videos and I've never voted or given a thumbs up.

So with the states listed above, I'd say several hundred people have actually read the whole thing, and if it's a good hot story, there will be people re-reading it over the years.

I also think that when a story is 'old' it will have less votes, even when people read it for the first time. I think people will be less inclined to vote on old stories because it might seem pointless to them.

Those are just opinions.

Thoughts?

I have wondered this as well from the beginning of my time posting stories.

I know from my own habits that I click on at least 4 stories for every one I read, probably more, but I have no idea if that's representative of other people's habits. So my guess would be that actual read-throughs are less than 25% of views. But since my view to vote ratio is generally around 80:1 to 120:1, it's still a far cry from the much smaller number of votes. My guess is that the reader number is far more than the vote number but substantially less than the viewer number, but I have no idea what the ratio is.

I recall a thread on this topic a while ago, maybe a year ago, and AwkardMD had a pretty good argument, if I recall, that reads are closer to views, based upon the retention she witnessed of viewers from one chapter to another in a series. That makes some sense to me. Why would one click on chapter 2 unless one read chapter 1 and wanted to continue? Some people would do so, but it's hard to believe that the ratio would be worse than 10 to 1. That applies in particular to stories that have tens of chapters.

With respect to your last point, I believe you are right. I've been around long enough to be able to observe some of my stories with "legs" -- meaning they've continued to get plenty of daily views. But the view to vote ratio seems to get higher over time. There's less motivation to vote for an old story, as you say.

Bottom line, if I had to guess, in the case of your stories, which are relatively short, I would guess that if you get 10,000 views and 100 votes you are getting less than 5,000 but more than 2,000 reads. But that could be way, way off.
 
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The retention of views to chapters does make a lot of sense. Hadn't thought of that. Although the votes and views decrease, the reads are still a lot. Great point.

And I've had comments about people rereading my stories, and when I've taken down stories to rework them, people ask where it went sometimes.
 
The only information I learn from the view statistics on my stories is:

1. Which category is most popular. That's incest.

2. Which of my titles is more attractive in a particular category. That's Virgin's Sister and Virgin's Sister Again (both incest, of course). The titles are probably the best thing about those stories.

3. Which categories have low view numbers.

All of the above is only relevant to me and my stories. Beyond those 3 statements anything else is guesswork, not statistical.
 
If I extrapolate from the retention rate shown in my two multi-chapter stories, where the number of readers can be seen by the third chapter (ie, the numbers who then read every chapter), my true reads to view ratio is about 1 : 5.

On my latest story, the first chapter (very clearly identified as a Prologue) has currently received 4k views, the 2nd chapter 2k views, and there are between 500 - 800 reads of the whole thing (12 chapters). A much longer, older story (23 chapters) shows the same thing: Ch.1, 29k Ch.2, 15k, Ch.23, 5k.

So on that basis, I conclude that complete reads for a stand-alone story is no more than one in every five views, which is why views alone mean zero.

If all you publish are stand-alone stories and say, "wow, look at all those views," you're kidding yourself. More people are clicking back than reading on. Which is why the first paragraph has to grab them.
 
I'm not sure I even know what a "read" is. I think a lot of readers skim until they find juicy parts, so if they skim half your story and have no clue what it was about, do you still want to count that as a "read?"

All readers should have to pass a comprehension test before they can be counted ;) Without it I'm not sure there's a point to worrying about the difference between a view and an actual read. The distinction can be a gray area.
 
Views or votes. Reader or wanker. Statistic on Lit are non-starters from the get go. You might be able to see trends but hard facts are few and far between.

Writing isn't about numbers, it's about words. Numbers don't get you published in mainstream. The words you write and the subject matter they need at the moment gets you published. After that, the only number that means anything are sales.
 
I no longer contemplate readers or LAUREL or any of it. Shakespeare nor Chopin ever wondered about LAUREL or LIT readers.
 
Shakespeare nor Chopin ever wondered about LAUREL or LIT readers.

This is true for obvious reasons, but it certainly also is true that Shakespeare cared about his audience and wanted to please it. He wanted to be popular and successful. That's very obvious from his plays. Shakespeare was not at all the sort of artist who sat cooped up in his room thinking, I want only to please myself and I don't give a damn what anyone else thinks or how popular I am.
 
This is true for obvious reasons, but it certainly also is true that Shakespeare cared about his audience and wanted to please it. He wanted to be popular and successful. That's very obvious from his plays. Shakespeare was not at all the sort of artist who sat cooped up in his room thinking, I want only to please myself and I don't give a damn what anyone else thinks or how popular I am.

What Simon said. :)
 
I assume four full reads for every vote - probably because I vote once every four or five stories I read.
 
I've always assumed that views is an inflated count. Maybe one real complete read for every five views, being optimistic.

Perhaps a better metric would be the number of votes / the number of views. That should give you an idea of engagement rather than numbers, but maybe that's a more useful thing to know?
 
I would guess that attentive reads are probably between 10-30% of total views. The variance would depend on category, author popularity, story score, time of year, planetary alignment, etc. That said, AMD does raise a good point about carrover readers for chapter stories.

As far as my personal habits go, I spent many, many years as an anon reader, and never voted. My apologies to the community for this. When I started submitting, I went back to find stories that had stuck in my mind, and voted on them at that time.

I currently have a policy that if I finish a story, I vote. I will also vote if I stop reading bc the writing is atrocious (talking more than a few typos here. Everyone gets a little bit of a pass on that front). I don't vote if I stop reading a story because either the narrative, style, or characters didn't click for me. I also don't vote if I stop reading because an author's tastes or fetishes severely misalign with my own.
 
The problem in trying to figure this out is that although it's easy to get total view and total vote figures for stories, we don't know where reads fall in between. If we can assume that, for the most part, only people who actually read the story vote for it (this isn't entirely true, but outside Loving Wives my guess is it's very nearly true), then votes equals views divided by the view:read ratio, then divided by the read:vote ratio.

I tried to find some data to help figure out if we can make any reasonable inferences about these ratios. The best data I can think of is the data from the late chapters in a steadily popular series. Tefler's Three Square Meals is an ideal series to study for this purpose. He has over a hundred chapters. I selected chapters 91 through 95, which were published at the end of last year. We have complete information about them because they are so highly rated that all appear on various toplists. They were published relatively close together, about a week apart or so. All are rated between 4.88 and 4.91, which means the score won't make much of a difference. There's no meaningful drop off from one chapter to the next in views, or in votes. Ch. 95 has the most views of the five, but only the third most votes. They're all 9-10 pages long.

The average number of views for these stories is 34698. The average number of votes is 1586. That's a view:vote ratio of 21.9. Call it 22. That's a fairly high number, considering that his stories have as about a devoted a readership as any on Literotica. It means that despite the high scores and enthusiasm there's still a lot of drop off from those who view his stories to those who vote on them. And his ratio is 4 to 5 times better than the view:vote ratio for my stories. It's 3 or so times better than the ratio for chapters in my series after chapter 1.


It seems likely to me that Tefler's series has a very good (meaning low) view:read ratio, probably about as low as any story series on Literotica. He has extremely devoted fans. It also seems likely to me, based on how extremely high the scores are, that he has a better than average (lower than average) read:vote ratio. His fans are highly motivated to make sure he gets high scores. If we assume that his view:read and read:vote ratios are significantly better than for the average Lit author, it allows us to make some rough inferences.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that at least 50% of those who click on his stories read them. I could be way off on that, but it seems reasonable. 25% seems like a very conservative figure to me. It seems likely to me that his view:read ratio is much higher than that for the average Lit author, especially for an average standalone story.

What's interesting is that even if it's only 25%, it means that only about 1 in 5 people who read the story vote on it. And my guess is his read:vote ratio is much better than the ratio for, say, my stories, none of which have scores close to his. That's a relatively high (to me, surprisingly high) ratio of people who finish a story but don't vote on it. I feel confident in saying if Tefler isn't doing any better than a 5:1 read to vote ratio the rest of us on average are probably doing quite a bit worse than that.

If Tefler's view:read ratio is 2:1, then his read:vote ratio is 11:1. And that means the average Lit author probably has a significantly higher read:vote ratio than that.

It seems unlikely that Tefler's read:vote ratio is as low as say, 2:1, because that would mean only 9% of those who click on chapters 91 through 95 are actually reading them. That seems improbable to me, given the extraordinary consistency of his numbers from one chapter to another. The stability of his numbers suggests a relatively high view:read ratio and a relatively stable read:vote ratio.


It seems likely to me, then, that we can safely say that the number of reads for an average story is at least 5 to 10 times the number of votes, and probably closer to 10. This figure is based on a lot of assumptions, but they seem reasonable to me. If I'm right, then it seems fair to say that if an average story has 100,000 views and 1000 votes it likely has less than 25,000 but more than 10,000 reads. Obviously, a lot of factors come into play: whether it's a standalone, its score, its category, etc.
 
I'm one of those people who follows views and votes very carefully. Even given that, I don't understand why the difference between views and reads is important to you, or how you can expect to get a meaningful answer to the question.

I might complicate your speculation.

attachment.php


This graph shows the views vs votes for my valentines, 2018 story, corrected to show only votes added, not votes removed. Overall, the story has about 83 views/vote (1.21 votes/100 views). That number is effected by sweeps. If I count only votes added and ignore votes removed then it's had 77 view/vote (1.29 votes/100 views).

The views/vote is not at all constant. The early slope is steep, meaning that its taking a lot of views to get a vote. The late slope (after the contest closed) is also steep. In between -- from about mid-morning on the day it published to the end of the contest -- it needs a lot fewer views to get a vote.

That pattern is consistent in my stories, and it isn't limited to contest stories. I'm just using contest stories because they have enough votes to give a good illustration. This graph is for my Summer Lovin' 2018 contest entry, also corrected for sweeps.

attachment.php


Overall, the story has had 73 views/vote, or 68 views/vote when corrected for the sweeps. But that really doesn't tell the story, because that ratio varies significantly over time.

The early voters (many of whom, I suspect, are one-handed readers skimming through stories to get off) gave it one vote for every 141 views. The late voters gave it one vote for every 137 views. I'm not sure why the late voters are less prone to voting, but I doubt it's for the same reason as the early voters.

From mid-morning on the day it was published to the end of the contest, the voters gave it one vote for every 58 views. The readers were more engaged than either the early or late readers.

In either case, it's hard to see that readers getting the story off the contest page have any more or less interest than anyone else. What does seem clear is that readers' engagement in the story, their tendency to vote, and probably their motivation for reading, changes with the age of the story.
 

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The views/vote is not at all constant. The early slope is steep, meaning that its taking a lot of views to get a vote. The late slope (after the contest closed) is also steep. In between -- from about mid-morning on the day it published to the end of the contest -- it needs a lot fewer views to get a vote.

All of this is speculation, but one explanation for the higher view:vote ratio over time is that it incorporates repeat views, including views of stories by their own authors. These views are much less likely to generate votes. I've re-read stories, and viewed my own stories repeatedly because I want to go back and look at them for one reason or another. But a repeat viewing almost never generates a vote (I've never voted for my own stories).

The other explanation is that if a story is submitted for a contest there's a much higher likelihood that readers will vote on the stories while the contest is going on and everyone knows the score actually matters.
 
All of this is speculation, but one explanation for the higher view:vote ratio over time is that it incorporates repeat views, including views of stories by their own authors. These views are much less likely to generate votes. I've re-read stories, and viewed my own stories repeatedly because I want to go back and look at them for one reason or another. But a repeat viewing almost never generates a vote (I've never voted for my own stories).

The older of the two stories has gained 30,000 views since the contest closed. I've read it maybe once. I can see a few people re-reading the story, but not enough to impact the overall result.

I think people who dig up older stories have less tendency to vote on them. One of my older, popular stories has -- at least for the last month or so -- been gaining more favorites than it has votes. It's probably been favorited three times since the last reader voted on it. People are still reading it and responding to it, but few are voting.

The other explanation is that if a story is submitted for a contest there's a much higher likelihood that readers will vote on the stories while the contest is going on and everyone knows the score actually matters.

Like I said, I see much the same pattern regardless of whether or not the story is a contest story. I just haven't been gathering all this data long enough to give a lot of good examples.

The other thing that makes me think that contest viewers don't really change the views/vote is that both of these stories were on I/T, so they fell off the category hub long before the contest was over. Despite that, you don't see a change in slope when the readers are coming mostly from the contest page. You also don't see a change when the contest page goes away and readers are using some other method to find the story.
 
The older of the two stories has gained 30,000 views since the contest closed. I've read it maybe once. I can see a few people re-reading the story, but not enough to impact the overall result.

I think people who dig up older stories have less tendency to vote on them. One of my older, popular stories has -- at least for the last month or so -- been gaining more favorites than it has votes. It's probably been favorited three times since the last reader voted on it. People are still reading it and responding to it, but few are voting.



Like I said, I see much the same pattern regardless of whether or not the story is a contest story. I just haven't been gathering all this data long enough to give a lot of good examples.

The other thing that makes me think that contest viewers don't really change the views/vote is that both of these stories were on I/T, so they fell off the category hub long before the contest was over. Despite that, you don't see a change in slope when the readers are coming mostly from the contest page. You also don't see a change when the contest page goes away and readers are using some other method to find the story.

Good points. I notice the same long-trend you do, and only two of my stories have been submitted to contests. Another explanation I can imagine is that people feel less of a need to vote on an old story, because its score already is established. They may feel there's no need, or that they're coming late to the party.
 
Great points above.

Yet another factor could be that people return to it to finish reading. That creates more views from just one person reading. And if the story is more than 1 page, it makes sense that someone would check it out, read a little, then come back later.
 
I assume four full reads for every vote - probably because I vote once every four or five stories I read.

I don't think you can set a reliable ratio because the stories you choose to vote on are not chosen randomly. Most likely, they are the stories that stand out as either especially good or especially bad.

A story that provokes strong reactions is likely to draw more votes per reader than a mediocre, fine but forgettable story.
 
Good points. I notice the same long-trend you do, and only two of my stories have been submitted to contests. Another explanation I can imagine is that people feel less of a need to vote on an old story, because its score already is established. They may feel there's no need, or that they're coming late to the party.
Many of my older stories, over time, have strengthened their score, so folk do continue to vote, to fave. I imagine it's readers trawling through my back catalogue, having discovered me through my latest piece.
 
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