Very Few Readers

This weekend, I posted an article illustrated with some photos (it's a road trip story). As is my habit when I want to include photos something I post online, I hosted the photos on one of my own web servers (actually, these photos were already there, so all I did was copy the URLs). And, as is also my habit, I have a window open watching my web server logs, so when post something with photos, I can see how often it gets "hits".

[ Digression for those less familiar with the technology:
Every time someone views that article, their computer gets the text of the article from gather.com, but has to also get the photos from one of my computers, where those photos are stored. I can see when some other computer on the Internet just asked for copies of those photos, and I can assume that when that happens, it means someone just viewed my article - though of course I don't know who. ]

I posted the article shortly after midnight on Saturday. Here are the dates and times of all of the hits (excluding myself) since then:

20060415-11:40:20
20060415-13:20:56
20060415-16:28:18
20060415-18:32:43
20060416-04:17:41
20060416-08:54:53
20060417-12:24:46
20060417-17:10:21
20060417-18:09:42

Note: I would not see hits from people using nongraphical (text-only) web browsers, because they'd just get the text from gather.com, and not get the images from my server. Also, I would not see most repeat hits from the same people, because once someone has viewed the article once, their web browser keeps a copy of the images and may not ask for them again the next time.

Those two caveats aside, here are the totals:
3 people read it on the first day (Saturday)
2 more people on the second day (Sunday)
3 more people on the third day (Monday)
none since then.

I posted this article to three groups: free thinking and free writing (286 members), Wanderlust (55 members), and Colorado (32 members). Colorado featured it. And yet, only 8 people clicked on it.

I thought this might be interesting or useful information to some of you, who don't usually get to see web server hit stats for any of your articles.

Comments: 4

Jim Bostick Apr 21, 2006, 3:31pm EDT

here's another trick for seeing how many people read your articles on Gather. By viewing a tag page for a particular tag in your article. if you change the drop down in the Community Picks module to Most Viewed you will see how many people viewed an article. Each view represents one person not everytime an individual person viewed the article.

So in this case I used the tag GEEK. http://www.gather.com/geek
For today I can see that this article here was read 6 times today.

If you click the view all link on this module the page has additional controls. Here the tag Geek has six articles. The article bt Sadi R "on beeing a geek" was read 26 times.

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Shava Nerad Apr 21, 2006, 3:43pm EDT

Great tip, Jim! That's very cool. Could you add an "all time" option to the most viewed?

Yr fellow gather geek,

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Ofer Inbar Apr 21, 2006, 3:54pm EDT

I actually noticed this a week or two ago, but of course it's impractical for commonly used tags. As gather gets bigger and bigger, it'll be impractical for almost all sensible tags. So the real "trick" is, if you want to see your view count, temporarily add an obscure tag like "zvhvelv" to your article.

Two questions:
1. If Gather stores this information, why not display it on each article's page by default, along with the article rating, tags, etc.?

2. How does Gather handle counting non-Gather members who view an article? Are they ignored, or does each hit count as a new person (even though it may be multiple views by the same person), or are all non-Gather users counted as one collective user (so if anyone not logged in views the article, the count goes up by one, but only once) ?

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Magi the magical poet is riding the wind again Apr 21, 2006, 7:45pm EDT

Couldn't the site programmers address this issue? Because of the huge numbers of postings, often using the same or similar tags, I find it hard work to find the work of 'newer' or relatively unknown writers. The most popular writers are featured and draw large numbers of comments. But to find articles with perhaps only two or three comments is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Magi

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Very Few Readers

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