View counts down?

[Smuttyandfun]

I've always had updates throughout the day. Every few minutes I'd get the odd comment or someone would favorite a story and the views would go up. But there hasn't been any activity lately, so something has definitely changed.

 

[ColtonWrites]

https://www.literotica.com/faq/publishing/my-work-reader-voting

It definitely says they update every 12-24 hours. Maybe something has changed but it seems like its supposed to be updating 1-2x a day.

 

[designatedvictim]

I thought the FAQs specified that they only update view counts every 12-24 hours?

That may or may not be true, or may be true for the general access count data.

Some of us are referring to the downloaded stats data available from the author's page.

 

[ElectricBlue]

https://www.literotica.com/faq/publishing/my-work-reader-voting

It definitely says they update every 12-24 hours. Maybe something has changed but it seems like its supposed to be updating 1-2x a day.

Votes are still real time, as are Comments - if the commenter is on a "trusted" list (with a track record such that their comments post immediately).

 

[RejectReality]

I think older stuff has been shunted to a lower priority, only updating views a couple of times a day, while newer work continues to update frequently. It was every 15 minutes for the longest time.

In my experience, Sunday has always been garbage. The Sunday beginning a major holiday travel week... I would expect it to be doubly shit. I downloaded my stats a few hours ago and dropped them in a spreadsheet. Nothing I've checked has moved since then, but I'll peek at a couple before I leave for the first day of my two day week tomorrow morning and see what I see. I'll drop all the stats into a new spreadsheet for a few days and see what I come up with since I'm off most of the week and have days off every week from now until New Year's.

It may be that they've throttled back stat updates in the ( U.S. ) overnight hours, when all the other major processes are running. We'll see. My muse isn't cooperating, so I may as well stat nerd with all this time I've got off.

 

[Trionyx]

I always wondered, does Lit sometimes change the 'similar stories' thing at the end of a story you read? Maybe that has something to do with it? Like currently your stories have dropped off that part? I have no proof of anything as I don't keep track of that, just wondering I guess.

I think you are correct that "similar stories" lists at the end of stories are more important than many people realize. But I can't see how it's negatively affected my stories. In general, my stories are appearing MORE on these lists over time rather than less, as far as I can tell.

I just noticed a bizarre feature of the Similar Stories feature on my two Holiday submissions. On one of them, my other stories in multiple different categories were featured in eleven out of the twenty Similar Stories. I usually have no or sometimes just one of my stories listed. (The other Holiday story was like that.)

Then to my surprise, when I went to comment about it in this thread, the Similar Stories feature had been changed back to a familiar distribution.

Has anyone else ever noticed a change in their Similar Stories feature a few days after publication? Has anyone else ever had a glut of their own stories show up in SS?

 

[SimonDoom]

I just noticed a bizarre feature of the Similar Stories feature on my two Holiday submissions. On one of them, my other stories in multiple different categories were featured in eleven out of the twenty Similar Stories. I usually have no or sometimes just one of my stories listed. (The other Holiday story was like that.)

Then to my surprise, when I went to comment about it in this thread, the Similar Stories feature had been changed back to a familiar distribution.

Has anyone else ever noticed a change in their Similar Stories feature a few days after publication? Has anyone else ever had a glut of their own stories show up in SS?

I believe the algorithm for similar stories changes after publication. There's a "placeholder" algorithm that determines which stories get listed as similar stories right after publication, and eventually it is replaced by the "shared favorites" algorithm. This matches my experience.

It makes sense that some of the similar stories would be your own stories, even if they are in different categories, because it makes sense that people who favorite one story of yours might also favorite another story, even if it's in a different category, because they like you as an author. This is what I have observed.

Until your story has achieved a certain number of favorites, you should expect significant swings and changes in the list. Once your story has achieved a certain number of favorites, the similar stories list will reach a certain level of stability.

 

[caleb35]

For what it's worth, new views on my stories have really declined over the last day, day and a half -- but I am still getting new views. It's a holiday week in the US, that just may be the single biggest reason for it [shrug].

 

[Candy_Kane54]

It's possible that they are no longer counting touches by web crawlers as reads. I say this because my seldom read stories used to have the same number of views (1, 2, or 3 depending on the day) every day as if one or more crawlers had walked through my catalog and now, for the past few days, they are showing zero reads.

However, I did get another vote on a story that had no views which would have nothing to do with the above (unless the crawlers like to vote).

 

[Smuttyandfun]

The views stopped about 24 hours ago. They started showing up again just now. My most read story got one view in 24 hours, as did my most recently published story. So when the views were stalled they were not being counted. Obviously something unusual is going, because my most read story normally gets at least 50-100 views per day.

Lately, the views have stopped appearing at night, but yesterday they stopped in the early afternoon.

 

[SimonDoom]

I checked again this morning at the usual time. 24-hour views were at about 40% of the normal levels from a few weeks ago. So, it seems to be a persistent thing. Nothing obvious has happened to my stories, like dropping off of lists, to explain why the view counts are down. I can understand them dropping slowly over time because I haven't published anything in over 11 months, but this was a sudden drop after a long and very stable period of daily views. Curious.

 

[MillieDynamite]

I have never done much of anything assiduously in my life. Not even during my brief flirtation with devotional prayer was I assiduous or even devoted. I was actually going to use assiduous in a story at one point, but used devoted instead.

I have assiduously tracked my story numbers since April 2017. One of the stats I follow is daily views of all my stories. I download the story stats at around the same time in the morning, usually at least once a week and sometimes more often, and calculate the daily averages. I haven't published a story in nearly a year, so for the last six months or so my daily views have been very stable and have not reflected the influence of newly published stories on views.

In the last month, I've noticed the daily average views have dropped significantly, around 25-30%. This morning, the 24-hour views were less than 50% of what they normally are.

Has anyone else noticed something like this?

 

[Reliant8432]

I came here looking for this topic. Mine are down significantly as well. My newest work has 47 votes and 4 comments, but only 471 views. Normally I'd be well over 1000 views by this point. The chapter before that is at 65 votes and 1203 views, as well as 0 comments, which, again, is seriously off the pace from previous chapters. I haven't recorded the data previously, but I'd guess I'm down 60% from where I would expect to be.

 

[NotWise]

These graphs show the views over time for my last two stories.

The slope of the curve gives the viewing rate. I don't see any drop in the viewing rate in the last few weeks.

Views are recorded when there's a change in votes, so not on a regular basis. If there are periods when the site doesn't update views, then they wouldn't appear here.

 

[Smuttyandfun]

It looks like the views have stalled again for the night. And since they never catch up the next day, I think that would explain why the views are down.

 

[RejectReality]

I don't see anything untoward in mine so far. I didn't see views update until 2:30ish, when it jumped. It's updated again since then, because the numbers aren't the same as when I looked a couple of times after 2:30. I was only checking once in a while, and only on a couple of particular stories in one pen name that were at the top of my list sorted by views.

Slapped them all in a spreadsheet and then put together one that's just going to track the views column day after day. I racked up 851 views across my whole catalog, which doesn't feel off to me, considering I've been inactive forever in all 3, and one is entirely Sci-Fi&Fantasy, chain, humor, and horror. ( More than 1/3 of my entire catalog ) It meshes up with the handful of votes and favorites I've picked up in the last 24 hours as well. 25 votes and 2 favs.

 

[PennameWombat]

I have assiduously tracked my story numbers since April 2017. One of the stats I follow is daily views of all my stories. I download the story stats at around the same time in the morning, usually at least once a week and sometimes more often, and calculate the daily averages. I haven't published a story in nearly a year, so for the last six months or so my daily views have been very stable and have not reflected the influence of newly published stories on views.

In the last month, I've noticed the daily average views have dropped significantly, around 25-30%. This morning, the 24-hour views were less than 50% of what they normally are.

Has anyone else noticed something like this?

I have stats, including views, going back to 2020, but I'm irregular. Usually grab them when I publish a new story, or around monthly. I have published three stories in 2025, the most recent in July.

Anyway, looking over the records, trying to account for some bizarre outliers, I don't see any major drop in views averaged per day.

Except. The last two captures I have are early September and late October. In that period, yes, the averaged views per day was down slightly over my historical view counts. But, FWIW, there was a similar lull in Sept-Oct of 2024...

 

[ElectricBlue]

My latest is in a low volume category (Transgender), but I don't know the usual category entry pattern.

What is unusual is the number of Votes per View. Usually my metric is 1:100, right now it's 4:100. Not that 4% is much, but "four times higher" makes it sound more impressive!

 

[ColtonWrites]

My latest is in a low volume category (Transgender), but I don't know the usual category entry pattern.

What is unusual is the number of Votes per View. Usually my metric is 1:100, right now it's 4:100. Not that 4% is much, but "four times higher" makes it sound more impressive!

I'm noticing the same thing. Views are low but votes and favorites are up.

 

[StillStunned]

I have never done much of anything assiduously in my life. Not even during my brief flirtation with devotional prayer was I assiduous or even devoted. I was actually going to use assiduous in a story at one point, but used devoted instead.

The closest I ever get is half-assiduous.

 

[designatedvictim]

It may be that they've throttled back stat updates in the ( U.S. ) overnight hours, when all the other major processes are running. We'll see. My muse isn't cooperating, so I may as well stat nerd with all this time I've got off.

Well, I've been recording my stats... umm... hourly since late March (yay scripts!) and I include the snapshot-to-snapshot difference in views/votes/favorites/readinglists values.

In the past there were few, if any zero-view periods.

Once AWoS dropped off the new list (I don't think it was rated highly-enough to be on any of the periodic-top lists, the view totals tailed off, as you'd expect, and the zero-view entries started cropping up.

But there are many more, of late, than previously.

Zero-View stats periods (hourly):
June: 1
July: 5
August: 14
September: 23
October: 37
November: 154

 

[iwatchus]

Well, I've been recording my stats... umm... hourly since late March (yay scripts!) and I include the snapshot-to-snapshot difference in views/votes/favorites/readinglists values.

In the past there were few, if any zero-view periods.

Once AWoS dropped off the new list (I don't think it was rated highly-enough to be on any of the periodic-top lists, the view totals tailed off, as you'd expect, and the zero-view entries started cropping up.

But there are many more, of late, than previously.

Zero-View stats periods (hourly):
June: 1
July: 5
August: 14
September: 23
October: 37
November: 154

The question that pops into me head is have views for older stories fallen off for some reason or is one of Manu's performance changes causing far fewer data updates? Or are they actually losing data right now.

 

[designatedvictim]

There could be several reasons.

I'm just popping in because I have the data set for my own works available.

The search algorithm could have changed, there were comments about how the 'simiar stories' entries might be selected or sorted, site traffic may simply be down, the 'market' for my piece may have simply reached the saturation point.

If there's a change somewhere behind the scenes, it would skew how pre- and post-change data may be compared, too.

 

[Reliant8432]

The question that pops into me head is have views for older stories fallen off for some reason or is one of Manu's performance changes causing far fewer data updates? Or are they actually losing data right now.

That's my concern as well. This coincides with the author feed issues and other update related problems, which makes me think that either my views aren't being captured, or my story isn't showing up for some users. It's probably unrelated, but my Patreon growth has stalled over the past few months, which is the same time period as this drop in views. It doesn't mean it's related, but it's concerning.

 

[Candy_Kane54]

So, after yesterday's lowest total reads ever (that I've recorded, anyway) for a day, I got nearly four times as many reads today. Go figure ...