What do "story views" mean now? · 2:15am Oct 19th, 2014
The site upgrade is pretty awesome; I'm still discovering big changes. But I'm confused by the new meaning of "story views". I saw my stats page says I have 242,137 story views, and I thought, Awesome! A little while ago I had only 100,000!
Then I realized that was impossible.
Exhibit A: Terein. 1 story. 1 chapter. 188 views of that chapter. Yet his/her stats page says 381 story views.
I had never heard of Terein until just now, when I went looking for someone with just 1 story with just 1 chapter, and as I was typing out his/her username just now, I got a pop-up notification saying "Terein posted a new thread in The Writer's Group."
Freaky.
But anyway.
Exhibit B: Web of Hope. Might be reading this. 3 stories, 6 chapters between them, 1242 views across those 6 chapters. Stats pages says 2059 story views.
Story views--what do they MEAN?
Near as we can tell it's a total of all views of all chapters of all stories on your account.
2542251 But as I pointed out, Terein has 1 story, and that story has 1 chapter, with 188 views, but Terein has 381 story views.
Story views used to mean the sum, over all stories, of the number of readers who'd read the most-read chapter, but they don't anymore.
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This appears to be the case.
My bet about Terein is that they had another story that they deleted; if you look at their stats, they seemed to have a spike a while ago.
Another possibility is that it counts views from blog posts, but that seems unlikely because it doesn't track with when they made their blog posts and it isn't enough views anyway.
It is also possible that they privately linked some multi-chapter story on their profile to people which hasn't been published yet.
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2542271 Titty D there is probably right. I've got one story, with one chapter, and I've never deleted any chapters or anything, and my views are very close.
There's a variance of about 16 views. Which could be lag time on the main counter. Or some kind of error margin. I dunno.
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2542271 Now that I look, TD is absolutely right. See where Terein posted his story? He's got views BEFORE that.
I looked at my novel's total views, a whopping 1.4k by itself. I then looked at the 84 accumulated views, and I have deduced that the site now adds up all total views of a story and divides by the number of chapters or something.
Math. Math everywhere in this bitch.
I have one story, one chapter:
Stats page says: Story Views 2,216
Total on the story page: 1,664
Looking at the stats page, it might be counting views of things like unpublished stories I had in progress on the site well before I published the one. Either that or something along the way is getting double-counted.
I added up all the chapters of my six stories -- 28 in all -- and came up with 21,876, which is within 36 of the total given on the stats page. Time lag could explain away those 36, especially since I had to read all those chapters, or at least scroll through the pages, to get those individual totals.
I agree with the above. It's in the ballpark of total chapter views (I'm not going through 53 stories and adding up by hand, sorry).
That's good for the writer who makes a popular, many-chapter story. Makes the number look bigger. Which means Letters from a Disgruntled Friendship Student may be the next 50 Shades.
Well, my page says I have two stories, and I actually have three, so the site is failing at very basic math.
2542421 It tells me you have 3 stories.
2542457 Weird... oh. On my profile page it says 3. On any of my story pages it says 2.
well this is awkward...
(which is really weird because I followed you just a a couple of days before this post)
did you know I'm following you
soo... yes, I did have an old story that I deleted that probably got some views as well as one that's in the works now. except that one story only got about fifty views before I deleted it, and I've only showed the other one too a few other people.
idk. this is weird
i think fimfiction is being buggy as of late. some comments say they were posted 6 days ago when they were just posted and stuff like that.
Story views would likely be all the hits to the story including the story front page, which wasn't previously displayed. That would account for the discrepancy.
Well, seems like most of the mystery is explained by deleted and private stories. I also wouldn't be surprised if fimfic code just occasionally bungled the math at various points in the past and the erroneous numbers now simply persist. That said, I still hold with Mark Twain in general: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Yeah I'm rather baffled by all this. I have 3 stories, the most popular of which has just under 2000 views. The other two are completely unloved and my blog posts don't garner too much attention. No deleted or private stories.
So why do I apparently have "8254 total views"?
According to our godlord Knighty The stats page shows chapter views combined with views of the main story page. Chapter views only show how many views the individual chapters have.
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Apparently it doesn't count the story you're "on". I've only recently worked this out.
I have no idea why it would do this.