Stats Page Don't Work

I'm just complaining about something that doesn't matter. Don't mind me.

So I know all you non-writers have never looked at it, but for every story there is a stats page. If you don't know where it is, next to the rating bar of every story is this little down arrow. Click that and a list including a link to the stats page will appear. There you will see three graphs. One graph shows you the story's rating over time. The other two track how many "views" the story has.

One graph is supposed to be the Total views. Every time someone clicks on a chapter it gets a "view". I think. Who knows what counts as a "view"? The last graph breaks down the number of views for individual chapters. So you can see where you're losing your audience for example.

This is where the problem is.

I just noticed that the Total views of my recent story "Ponies vs Kaiju" is about half that of the views of the one chapter that's been published. See?

How can the story have a Total number of views HALF that of the views of the one chapter in the story? That makes no sense!! I have two possible explanations. One: the graphs are broken. Two: they don't count a "view" in the same way. Maybe one of them is only counting unique visits. So you know how many total different people have looked at your story versus how many times a chapter was read. I don't know, but it's annoying.

How can I trust these graphs and statistics now? I found some of the information I gleamed from them really interesting you know. Like check this out. It's from my second flash fic collection.

The comparison I would like to highlight is the difference in views between the literal SECOND story in the collection and the 14th story published a full three months later. Why does "No One Cares" have 40 more views (as of this writing on Aug 15th 2022) then my third minecraft crossover? Heck, hidden in this image is the clear bias of readers actually skipping over my "Steve and Gem" story to read other chapters instead as well. People deliberately avoided reading it.

I like looking at the stats, particularly for my flash fic collections, and seeing what it is my audience is drawn to and what it is they are avoiding. Then I can speculate why that is which I find to be kind of fun. There are so many questions you get from pages of info like this. Like, I thought Derpy was supposed to be really popular, especially in the macro/micro niche. So why did so few of my readers even click on "Sponsored" which is blatantly labeled as featuring Derpy? Two later chapters, "Dealing with Size-Shifters" is clearly marked as being "realistic" and those have more views? If only barely. I thought the macro/micro fandom was supposed to be all about the impossible situations of size, why would they be more drawn to stupid realistic stories that ruin the fantasy than to the queen of bubbly ass herself DERPY!?

It's stuff like this that makes me shrug my shoulders and simply say, "this fandom is weird."

Have a nice day everybody! And... try not to question your sanity while your at it. I did today. It wasn't happy fun times...