Let's Talk About—Pageviews

Is she looking at my post?!? Does that laptop look old?
Source

Why I Care About Pageviews

As an author, here are three things I care about (not ranked in any particular order and not an exhaustive list):

1. Visibility—Is my post, book, comic book, comment, etc., being seen by anyone?
2. Feedback—When people do see what I've created, what do they think?
3. Compensation—It's hard to create, and keep on creating it, without some level of remuneration, and I would like to create on a full-time basis if it's possible.

In the case of the list above, I believe visibility drives the other two. So, being able to track how many eyeballs are getting on my posts/comments is important to me.

For Da Newbies

If you are on Steemit and you make your way down to the bottom of a post (just before the comment section, if any), you will find a bunch of different icons and numbers running from left to right across the page. Approaching the far right, just before you get to the social media sharing icons, you will see an eyeball icon followed by a number.

The number represents the total number of pagviews a post has. When I first took a look at it, I thought it might represent unique users, but it doesn't. You can refresh the page and you will see that the counter goes up.

You Got A Problem?

To me, this is not very helpful in and of itself. Especially when I know I've been back to the page three or four times to reply to a comment someone else left. If those commenting on my post are doing the same thing, then each time they're doing it, the pageview counter is logging that view. So, instead of having, say, a dozen unique views, by the time it's said and done, I might only have three or four.

Now, this doesn't mean pageviews are totally worthless to me. They can tell me how many times people are coming back to the post, too (less my own), but I still need to know unique views to have something to compare it to.

I propose then, that a unique visitor counter be added.

Is It Easy To Do?

I don't know how, but daily unique users for all of Steemit can be found on sites like hypestat.com, where I grabbed this—

Would That Make You Happy?

Well...mostly.

Even with unique users up and running, there are inaccuracies that may occur. A post by @xervantes four months ago points out that unique visitors are generally determined through unique ip addresses, which means this can occur—

If multiple people connect to Steemit from the same household this will generate one IP-address. But when you are at a different household (for example visiting your moms) than you will be counted as a new unique visitor.

@xervantes goes on to say there's no way to know how many actually unique users are getting on through the same ip address, or checking in on the go or at someone else's house, which means unique visitors could be skewed a little or a lot. Regardless, a unique visitor counter would be more useful than just a pageview counter.

You Still Want To Keep Pageviews?

Yes. At the very least, I could ballpark my pageviews per unique visitor. And, I could keep track of activity like this:

The first three images I grabbed from three different posts that were published by three different users at three different times on Steemit, the oldest being about a year, and the last being fairly recent. The fourth image is from my latest post published this past Saturday night.

All of them have more upvotes than they have pageviews.

Say What?!?

Shouldn't be that surprising, should it? If you've been around Steemit for at least a few days and done any reading of titles or actual posts from the trending or hot pages, there should be at least two obvious answers that come to mind. A third, though, shouldn't be too far behind. After noodling it for a minute or so, here's what I came up with as possible reasons for this oddity:

1. Technical issue—Steemit has them (it's still in beta after all), so it's possible that the counter isn't firing every time.

My guess is, though, this is the least likely explanation, as someone surely would've pointed it out long before me, given the year or so long time frame. The fact I can't find any information on a suggestion to fix doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but I think there would have been more than a few people questioning it.

1. Bots—I don't claim to be an expert on them, but I believe these don't actually visit a page in a way that would be recognized by the pageview counter. A votebot would come through the code itself, not to a human interface on the page.

This I think is very likely, and it would be nice to know who's human and what's not. The problem is, it's not always obvious when you look at who voted whether or not it's a person or a bot. In the case of my post mentioned above, I did go looking, and found at least one, if not two upvoters which could be bots (one of them had no other activity on it but voting and was receiving delegated Steem Power).

The rest though, had the characteristics of a human user—they weren't just voting to get rewards for curating, but were also posting and/or commenting. Which leads me to—

1. People are voting from their feed, blog or some other page like trending or in the tags—You know like here:

This is from my own personal blog feed, where the top three are resteemed. I also voted for them, after going to each post and reading it.

I know people don't have time. I also know people want to make a quick buck. In the case of a resteem appearing in your feed, it's easy to think, "If (fill-in-the-blank) thinks it's good, then it must be good." Even if you're following someone who consistently posts good content, it's an easy habit to fall into.

And if you're time strapped, but you at least want to know what others are leaving as an upvote, on Busy you can stay on your feed, know exactly what people paid by hovering over the upvote counter, and then reward accordingly.

Complain, Complain, Complain

I guess I should at least be glad that a human is responsible for the vote over the bot, and at least they trust either the author or the resteemer enough to come up with quality content, but...

Don't worry. I'm not losing sleep over it. It's just disheartening, that's all.

So, Now What?

I don't know. I'd like to advocate for a counter for unique users while keeping the pageview counter. Though it's not perfect, counting unique visitors has to be a more accurate way of measuring eyeballs on a post than just pageviews, which can be too high or too low based on the kind of activity.

The Floor Is Now Open

Any thoughts?