Reality check: is Views actually right for story subsmission?

[Gisevius]

My first story was posted yesterday it already has 17,000 views. Is that possible? I find it hard to believe that so many people have, at a minimum, clicked on my story in a single day. My story is 6 pages, could that be part of the high view count? Even some ratio beneath that still seems impossibly high.

That's an astonishing thing if right-- it far exceeds many active threads (in terms of a Views metric) on this forum, many of which go back weeks in duration.

 

[rgraham666]

Yep, that's entirely possible. I've had it happen once or twice myself.

 

[Darkniciad]

Your views number, as it is calculated, is probably right. Depending upon the category, that sort of number is fairly easy. Loving Wives or Incest/Taboo will draw masses of readers like that.

For instance, my Romance story pulled in around 13k views during a contest ( higher readership draw ) during the entire near-month of the contest, while the Loving Wives story that just came out pulled that off in the first day.

As to whether each page counts as a view or not, that's never really been explained in any set-in-stone fashion. They FAQ says that someone returning to finish your story later could rack up another view, but it doesn't specify whether that applies if they bookmark the page they were on, rather than returning to the first page and clicking through. If I were coding it, the logical thing would be for the first page only to increment the counter, but there's never been a statement one way or the other.

Looking at views from stories of different lengths, even in the same category, doesn't really tell you anything either, because your tagline/title/day of release can affect it all too much.

 

[elfin_odalisque]

To my great regret, people clevererer than me have explained. Views are not very scientific.

Every time someone clicks on your story you get a hit, even if they click back after the first paragraph.

Better to rely on votes, comments and mails.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

After a number of discussions here, my best guesstimate is that views mean somewhere between 15 percent and 30 percent of the figure in discrete human viewers.

It's still a lot.

 

[JamesSD]

That's an astonishing thing if right-- it far exceeds many active threads (in terms of a Views metric) on this forum, many of which go back weeks in duration.

The vast majority of views come when a story is brand new on the New Stories page. I for one primarily start my own reading there, and will explore author's other stories who I enjoy.

The forum is a small part of literotica's overall readership. I was a reader for months before I ever posted on the forum. And I know that most of the readers who have contacted me through feedback aren't forum users.