Are Lit's story view numbers credible?

I find the view figures posted by Lit almost hard to believe - a good story will post 20,000 views in a view days, and over a few months rack up 50,000 to 100,000.

Are there really that many literate "sex positive" people out there?

I understand that "views" does not mean they necessarily read the whole thing, or any of it even. As I understand it, it means they "click-in" to the first page at least. It is still a very high number!

The number gets even more hard to believe when you consider how few vote - .2 percent to .35 percent, it appears. Or, one out of every 300-to-500 people who click-in actually finish the story and bother to vote. That seems mighty low to me.

Does anyone have detailed or "inside" knowledge about this? Any opinions out there? Am I missing something?

There are close to 600,000 registered Lit members.

And countless numbers of lurkers, as I was, before I joined.

And an extreme number of erotic story searchers using google or some such to find their particular kink.

Lots of people out there checking out everyone's naughty bits.

I myself usually view at least 5-10 stories a day. Also remember there can be some "repeat customers". I'm not sure how browser "back" and "forward" clicks are counted though. My feeling has always been the numbers are slightly inflated, but not by more than 10-20%.

Roxanne Appleby said:

I find the view figures posted by Lit almost hard to believe - a good story will post 20,000 views in a view days, and over a few months rack up 50,000 to 100,000.

Are there really that many literate "sex positive" people out there?

I understand that "views" does not mean they necessarily read the whole thing, or any of it even. As I understand it, it means they "click-in" to the first page at least. It is still a very high number!

The number gets even more hard to believe when you consider how few vote - .2 percent to .35 percent, it appears. Or, one out of every 300-to-500 people who click-in actually finish the story and bother to vote. That seems mighty low to me.

Does anyone have detailed or "inside" knowledge about this? Any opinions out there? Am I missing something?

Click to expand...

Therer are some stories with views in the millions. My most viewed is 102,000 now and there are some others who are closing in on 100,000. And there are some with under 5,000 over a couple of years. It depends on the category and the individual writer's popularity. I would think the numbers are correct. It wouldn't make any sense to pad them.

Boxlicker101 said:

Therer are some stories with views in the millions. My most viewed is 102,000 now and there are some others who are closing in on 100,000. And there are some with under 5,000 over a couple of years. It depends on the category and the individual writer's popularity. I would think the numbers are correct. It wouldn't make any sense to pad them.

Click to expand...

This is my most viewed story - I do have two others that are close.

Anal Sex (Gasp!): A Hands-On Manual
(Some tips to help you slip your cock into her ass)
4.71 Rating
849 Votes
256700 Views
How To (English) Category
02/25/03 Posting Date
Public Comments: 32

But - it has been up for almost 3 years. And there are much newer stories with plenty of views.

Literotica is a free site - I don't stress about number of views.

Web site traffic is measured by 'reach', the number hits per day to the site per 1 million of internet population. (www.alexa.com gives traffic figures for most sites) Literotica's 'reach' is 1000 per million; the English speaking internet population is circa 200 million so you can estimate Lit' is receiving approximately 200,000 visitors per day. That is why stories on the New List pull such quick 'hits'. However - when you look at where people are on Lit - like this minute 269 visitors of which 94 are guests and 180 are doing something other than reading stories ie. they are on the forum boards, 25% are looking at the Amateur Pics postings

This pattern of usage of Lit is fairly normal, between a third and half of visitors are here to read, the rest browse. By the time you discount repeat visits by same user (I visit 4 or 5 times a day for example) actual readers on a daily basis is probably no more than 50,000 - on the other hand, they may read more than one story while logged in.

Statistics - fun in'it.

edit: corrected web address

I think the hits are probably correct. On a day when I just read, I might hit ten of fifteen stories before I find one that holds my interest enough to actually read it. Assuming I read five, that could be between 25 and 50 stories who get a view from me that day. I also tend to read in small chunks, so I might hit a decent sized one three or four times before I finsih it.

sweetsubsarahh said:

849 Votes

Click to expand...

DAYUM!

I've noticed that when I've pulled up my own stories to see how they look and if the edits had really been posted it doesn't regester me as a view. Other than that, I couldn't have told you what these guys did. I leaned something reading this thread.

impressive said:

DAYUM!

Click to expand...

Thanks.

(I shouldn't be posting stats.)

They probably count it when people backstep through web pages, so I doubt it.

Tom Collins said:

I've noticed that when I've pulled up my own stories to see how they look and if the edits had really been posted it doesn't regester me as a view.

Click to expand...

Yes they did regiser you as a view, it just didn't update immediately.

A "View" is counted every time the server gets a request to send a page. It doesn't matter if it was a person or a search engine that requested the page. The story statistics the authors see are only updated periodicly every hour or three hours.

The "Views" stat is absolutely accurate, in the sense that it is an accurate count of the number of times that page has been requested and sent by the server. Since it does NOT distinguish between 'bots, search engines, and people who may or may not be reading the story, it is a pretty useless level of accurate information.

I suppose it is possible to separate out the 'bots and search engine "views" and determine how many are views generated by real people -- 'bots and search engines will register hits on multiple stories so that if no people viewed them they would all have the same number of views; any thing over that "automatic" level of hits is people checking the story out. That would require access to all of the site's statistics and more time than I'd want to invest in what would still be a relatively meaningless statistic.