Declining views?

[SimonDoom]

Has anyone noticed if the number of story views has decreased over time? Not just for their own stories, but for stories generally?

I've noticed that my more recent stories have not received the same number of views as very similar and analogous stories in the same categories did two years ago. But, more to the point, I've noticed that the threshold for getting a story on the Top 250 12-month most-viewed toplist has dropped over the last two years from about 113,000 to about 92,000. That's a noticeable drop. I wonder why that is.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Somebody is likely to come along and do a real statistics analysis, but my first thought is that it is probably related to the volume of stories published.

 

[RejectReality]

My assumption, from when it first started happening, is that they've updated whatever bot/spider exclusion list they were using for the longest time to something that catches more of the non-human traffic and excludes it.

The difference more or less happened overnight.

Views has never been a raw number. Even in the beginning, it was about half of the actual hits the story page gets, according to a post Laurel made in the far-flung past. The rest were all bots and spiders that were excluded.

 

[NotWise]

Has anyone noticed if the number of story views has decreased over time? Not just for their own stories, but for stories generally?

Your observation about the toplist might be as good an indication as you'll find. I can tell you what's happened with mine, but that result could be completely subjective.

My second story for Lit was published 10/6/15 and I started keeping track of views a little more than a month later when I started wondering if some days of the week give more traffic than others. (The short answer to that is "No." The variation from one day of the week to another is pretty negligible.)

For that story, by year, the slope of views/day and the median views/day for each year since have been:

_____slope_median
2015 __58___56
2016 __33___30
2017 __21___18
2018 __16___14
2019 __17___12

The number is strongly influenced by the spin-off views the story gets after I publish a new story. So one explanation for the trend is that I'm not publishing as often as I did in 2015-2016. Another factor is that my catalogue is larger now, so when I do get spin-off views they are distributed over a larger number of stories.

The views/day also varies from one story to another by something like an order of magnitude.

On the other hand, if I rank my stories by total views, then three of my top five most-viewed stories were published in the last two years. The other two were published in 2015. I think the high views for recent stories is probably a matter of name recognition, not a site trend.

If there is a site trend, then it could be because of site placement on search engines, which has an effect on site visits. If I google lines from my stories that have been ripped off, then the original story on Lit often ends up being listed after the copy. That's why Lit needs to update its format.

 

[HeyAll]

In my opinion, and from what I see, it's that there's a lot of stories to chose from, so readership gets spread out.

Also, for my own stories, I notice that views go up and down. Some contest seasons I'll get a lot of views across different genres, other times it'll go down, then the next context it goes back up.

So I think a lot of it is just a roll of the dice.

According to analytics, Literotica still gets millions and millions of unique monthly viewers from around the world. That number hasn't declined.

 

[SimonDoom]

My assumption, from when it first started happening, is that they've updated whatever bot/spider exclusion list they were using for the longest time to something that catches more of the non-human traffic and excludes it.

The difference more or less happened overnight.

Views has never been a raw number. Even in the beginning, it was about half of the actual hits the story page gets, according to a post Laurel made in the far-flung past. The rest were all bots and spiders that were excluded.

This makes much sense.

 

[RejectReality]

The site traffic has barely changed at all in the time since the views dived. Although the reason for the update of the site is Google strong-arming everyone to conform to their standards or risk being penalized in results, and thus relegated to obscurity.

Notice what they're rolling out first: tags, search, story pages... ( other than the user CP, which was the ultimate beta test bed ) It's designed to catch most of the traffic in a form that meets Google standards.

Cross-referencing the same stories with a members-only site that doesn't record a download from non-members, I estimated that somewhere around 30-35% of the views years ago were bots and spiders. Now that number is somewhere in the 20% range, and perhaps lower.

That's only an average, though. The percentage of non-human hits spiked in proportion to the popularity of the category. I/T and LW were always higher percentages of bots. They still are, but if my assumption is correct and they've updated the exclusion list, it's disproportionately affecting those higher bot categories compared to everything else.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

Might also be related to the trend of fewer and fewer people being able to read anything longer tha 140 letters.

 

[Inkhorn]

Might also be related to the trend of fewer and fewer people being able to read anything longer tha 140 letters.

Point.


It might also be that the site's look is somewhat...erm... antiquated. It is an older site, it looks like an older site, and that might well not appeal to the more modern palette. There are sections of the site that haven't been updated since 2006, a number of dead links, and the layout is a bit jumbled.

I'm not saying that this IS the cause, but it's something worth considering.