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Old 03-01-2014, 11:32 AM   #1
SilkPantyGirl
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Question Interpreting "views" statistic

I had my first story approved last night. This morning the "view" count is over 7000. This can't possibly be the number of people who have read my story, so what does it actually mean?
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Old 03-01-2014, 11:38 AM   #2
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Views are kind of an undefined statistic. Anytime someone clicks on your story(even if they immediately click off)its a view. Anytime you look at it counts as well.

There are also web crawlers, bots things of that nature that count as well.

Out of 7k its impossible to tell how many are real reads.

Voting doesn't help because a lot of readers don't bother to vote. The way I've always looked at it is if 10% are actual reads that would still be a surprise.
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Old 03-01-2014, 11:42 AM   #3
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Thanks for the speedy, helpful response!
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Old 03-01-2014, 01:21 PM   #4
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The stats don't seem to update immediately and at the same place. For example, my third story was approved recently and I noticed that my stats are different depending on where I was looking. My story (5th Anniversary to Remember) says that it had 19,840 views if you go to my story. When I check out my submissions stats page, it says I have 20,888 views. My ratings were different depending on which page I was looking from. They eventually evened out but I've seen 4.58 from the new releases page down to 4.51 on another.

It's kind of difficult to judge stats though. My first story had the most views & comments. My 2nd & 3rd had less views & comments than the previous but the ratings were higher than the first.
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Old 03-01-2014, 02:56 PM   #5
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There's no way of knowing for sure, though there are almost certainly various bots and spiders included in the total.

Comparing my results across three different sites ( one of which requires a membership to register a view ) and correlating that with Alexa traffic stats has brought me to the general conclusion that Lit's popularity results in something along the lines of a 15-20% increase in "non-reader" hits over other erotic story sites.

I had the opportunity to experiment with my last story, since it didn't appear on the new stories list or the category hub for some time after it posted.

I let it sit for a while, and the view count barely moved. I then posted the new story announcement to my website, Twitter, and Facebook. The story was still more or less invisible on Lit, as it was only showing on my author submissions page.

When I did that and checked the views, they only increased by twenty or so. That's approximately in keeping with the hits I see on my own website when I post a link on Twitter and Facebook in close proximity. ( Filtering out known bots such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, Bing, etc )

That initial burst trickled down to the odd hit for a few more minutes, and then the views suddenly shot up. When I checked, the story had finally appeared on the new story list and category hub.

Considering what fertile ground Facebook and Twitter are for web crawlers of all types, ( good and ill ) I'm leaning toward more of those views being actual people than I'd previously thought. I was guessing that somewhere in the neighborhood of 25-40% were bots and spiders, but I think I'd move both of those numbers back about 5% after this little experiment.

I'll see whether the same sort of results happen the next time I catch a story posting without any real Lit visibility for a while.
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Old 03-01-2014, 03:13 PM   #6
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Through all that I read the story and thought it was real good. As in real good.

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Old 03-01-2014, 05:48 PM   #7
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SilkPantyGirl View Post
I had my first story approved last night. This morning the "view" count is over 7000. This can't possibly be the number of people who have read my story, so what does it actually mean?
What number would you expect? I don't know if 7000 unique human readers is correct, but it doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility.

There are about 1.5 billion English speakers in the world. If just 100 million of them use the Internet for porn, and 1% of those are into written porn, that's a million. If 50% of porn readers come to the #1 written-porn site on the Internet, that's half a million. If 10% of those stop by to read the New Stories section on any given weekend, that's 50,000 people reading through the list and considering whether to click on your story.

Quote:
Originally Posted by lovecraft68 View Post
Views are kind of an undefined statistic. Anytime someone clicks on your story(even if they immediately click off)its a view. Anytime you look at it counts as well.

There are also web crawlers, bots things of that nature that count as well.

Out of 7k its impossible to tell how many are real reads.
I don't know whether 7k translates to "7000 unique readers" or "3500 unique readers who each loaded both pages of a two-page story" or "1000 unique readers who each read the story seven times". But I do think most of those views are live people, not web crawlers.

I keep a record of view counts on my stories. I have a couple that are on category toplists; now and then they move up and down the toplists and when they do the view rate changes sharply. It shouldn't matter to a web crawler whether a story is #2 or #9 in category - they both appear on the exact same pages - but it makes an immediate and obvious difference to the rate of new views, which is what I'd expect from human readers.

I was going to say that the big first-week spike in views also seems more like a human thing, but maybe that's not true; could be that the smart crawlers are able to recognise pages that update more frequently and check them more often, so they'd be staking out the New Stories section like the rest of us.
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Old 03-01-2014, 06:39 PM   #8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bramblethorn View Post
I was going to say that the big first-week spike in views also seems more like a human thing, but maybe that's not true; could be that the smart crawlers are able to recognise pages that update more frequently and check them more often, so they'd be staking out the New Stories section like the rest of us.
Targeted story-stealing bots and human story-horkers would also exhibit that behavior. Considering how much Lit work is posted all over the internet without permission, and the even larger amount where excerpts are used as text filler on fly-by-night porn sites that are nothing more than vehicles for ads and malware, you have to take that into account.

That's what pushes my estimates as high as they are for bot-based hits.
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Old 03-01-2014, 06:56 PM   #9
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I would've been happy with a dozen, but your numbers make complete sense - thanks!
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Old 03-01-2014, 07:00 PM   #10
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Always remember, if you start doing comparisons, that you only compare your numbers with stories in the same category.

The size of the readership in the different categories varies so widely that if you look at the numbers on a story in Incest ( the most extreme example ) and compare it to one in Sci-Fi&Fantasy, it can make you think your story is a complete flop, when it may in fact be a blockbuster compared to other stories in the same category.
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Old 03-03-2014, 12:02 PM   #11
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A.I.R. computer analysis has shown that the "view" figures are generally overstated by 4 to 5 times on the first 100,000 views. In other words a story that reports 5,000 views probably only had 1000-1200 people open the story. This "reader" inflation is a strategy used by the Palace to encourage authors.

However, once a story has received 100,000 views the view numbers become much more reliable. For example, the next 900,000 views are only inflated by approximately 10%. Over one million the inflation figure falls to less than 1%.

For an example, The following story, Literotica's #1 All-Time story, really only has been viewed by 3,401,393 readers and not the number reported by the site.
.


"Daddy?" I Whispered Stephanie seduces her handsome father.
4.53 45363 3593246 Incest/Taboo (English) 02/19/06 approved
Public Comments: 1066

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Old 03-04-2014, 07:08 AM   #12
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All the supposed information in the above post is total and complete bullshit.

There is no such thing as AIR, just scouries as his propaganda alt, tooting his own horn over a story he has spent years inflating the views, votes, and scores on.
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Old 03-05-2014, 01:51 PM   #13
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If you look at the views at the bottom of the story by where people favorite, you'll see a pretty accurate count, my browser has it in light gray, so it's easily missed.

That count compared to the 'author control panel' count makes me think it's a unique view statistic, as they are never the same.
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Old 03-05-2014, 03:19 PM   #14
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Quote:
Originally Posted by PayDay View Post
If you look at the views at the bottom of the story by where people favorite, you'll see a pretty accurate count, my browser has it in light gray, so it's easily missed.

That count compared to the 'author control panel' count makes me think it's a unique view statistic, as they are never the same.
As far as I can tell, the difference between them is timeliness - the one on the "view submissions" page appears to be live, the one at the bottom of the story is only updated once or twice a day. For old stories that aren't getting a lot of hits from day to day, the counts seem to be very close, which suggests it's not about unique vs non-unique views.
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Old 03-05-2014, 06:04 PM   #15
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bramblethorn View Post
As far as I can tell, the difference between them is timeliness - the one on the "view submissions" page appears to be live, the one at the bottom of the story is only updated once or twice a day. For old stories that aren't getting a lot of hits from day to day, the counts seem to be very close, which suggests it's not about unique vs non-unique views.
I agree with the bold, but most of my stories have radically different counts between the two, like by thousands.

Maybe it's cause I'm a crappy author
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Old 03-05-2014, 07:54 PM   #16
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Old 03-06-2014, 01:35 AM   #17
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I've seen some pretty fucked up stories that had a crazy amount of views & comments.
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Old 03-07-2014, 06:56 AM   #18
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mello_SixtyNine View Post
I've seen some pretty fucked up stories that had a crazy amount of views & comments.
Views are easy to fake, just keep hitting the view button and the back button. Doesn't meant anything except sore fingers.

If you check the comments you'll find a lot of alts and authors replying to every comment. Time consuming but people do it. I don't understand why. It doesn't make the story any better and they know it's all fake so why do it.
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