what does views mean?

shirleyann

Virgin
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Jul 13, 2015
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In the place where it says how many views my story has, does that mean that those people actually read it, or that they just clicked on it?
 
Views are a mystery. One thing it certainly doesn't represent is the number of people who have read the story.

The hits are filtered, but nobody knows exactly what is filtered from them. Most likely it's known bots/spiders.
 
The number of pages your story has seems to impact the view counter. If your tale is three pages, three hits would mean either one person has read all three or three people have checked out one page each. As an approximation, I usually divide the views by page count.
 
The number of pages your story has seems to impact the view counter. If your tale is three pages, three hits would mean either one person has read all three or three people have checked out one page each. As an approximation, I usually divide the views by page count.

In my experience, page count doesn't affect the views to any significant degree, leading me to believe that same-session views of multiple pages don't increment the counter.

Ebon Genesis, 23k words, 7 Lit pages, posted 06/06/06, 24175 views.
Grandfather Yule, 3k words, 1 Lit page, posted 11/11/06, 24528 views.
Casting Off Convention, 16k words, 5 Lit pages, posted 07/28/06, 25597 views.

All in the same category. All posted during the same year. If more pages equaled more views -- especially to the degree you're suggesting -- this would not be happening.

Casting also has half-again more votes than either of the other two.
 
When I calculated it, based upon the numbers the same stories draw on other sites, I came up with about a 25% "inflation" of views by comparison.

That 25% was actually surprising, considering how much higher Lit's traffic raking is than even its nearest competitor in the written erotica market. I expected it to be a lot higher. Either Lit does a better job of filtering those than I would expect, spider/bot traffic doesn't scale as much as I would expect, or a combination of the two.

So, the first thing I would do is cut the number by 25% to eliminate all those bots and spiders.

After that, who knows what percentage represent readers vs. people who opened it and back-clicked soon after.
 
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