As authors you are of course familiar with the fact that after the first chapters the number of readers drop. From story to story keeping a fourth of what you had between chapter 1 and 5 past chapter 20 is an accomplishment. Looking at the story map I just noticed something that doesn't make much sense to me. Diminishing numbers are to be expected, but growing ones ? On some chapters I have a dip of nearly 300 views between a chapter and the following. Let's take some numbers to explain Chapter 6 :6450 views Chapter 7 :6170 views Chapter 8 :6350 views And it happens multiple times. Are some readers skipping chapters without even seeing what in them? I understand getting in a chapter and skipping ahead because it is boring, but who skips chapters and read the rest, or just decide to read a chapter without knowing the context of it? Has anyone noticed something similar to that? Or has an explanation that makes sense for this behavior?
An explanation I could think of: You published chapter 6. The reader read chapter 6 A day or two later you publish chapter 7 and 8. The reader clicks the latest link (chapter 8) in his notification menu, goes to the story map, choose chapter 6 to read the last lines, continues with 7 and then 8. That way 6 and 8 would receive more views.
Multiple views from the same reader on the same device are counted on the total views? IF it is so and it also counts the author then I thinks the answer might be comments. I check all comments and reply to most so between me and everyone that commented on the chapter getting notifications it my increase the traffic on some chapters. I Thought that it remembered if your account has read a chapter and didn't add views after the first.
I think so. First chapters usually have huge amounts of views. At The Cabin has more than 200k views while there aren't that many registered members. Reading a chapter while not being logged in should also count as a view. Loop destinations within game stories should behave similarly. Comments should also slightly increase the views. Chapter reads are saved by the date/time the user read it. (to give a clue if a chapter is read, updated or unread) Views are saved to an extra table without linking to the user. (As far as I know)
For the more views than members I always figured that it was just a big population of unregistered readers. IF you're correct (and I'll work under the assumption that you are) then a lot of strange things suddenly make a lot more sense to me. But it gives strange results too, with a lot of people clicking the story when they see it up the first chapters should have an even more enormous number of views (about half the views with the number of times the readers and the authors end up clicking on it to access the story map)
Bookmarks may play into this. A reader stops at a certain page and when they come back to the story the view is counted twice for that chapter. They stop at six and then come back and read seven and eight. Branching may also affect this. A reader takes one path and then goes back and takes another.
Sure sounds more reasonable than people skipping chapters. I worked under the assumption that views were counted once (at least for registered users) then even if it worked for them the unregistered users would have their views counted each time (unless there is a thing checking ip adress) It just feels very weird seeing the numbers playing yo-yo like that.
I think chapter titles also play into it as well. People who are just looking for chapters with sex in them might look at the story map and only go to ones that seem likely to have sex in them. At least that is what I have noticed looking at my own maps.
Brain! Why don't you work correctly? Mystery solved at least for my story. The chapters where the counts goes up are the ones that are in the top chapters. People that are not (yet) readers click on them and get the counter up inverting the natural decrease in views going down the line. It was just under my nose, I had no chance to notice it.
People go to the story map quite often. Chapters with more likes and views and chapters with a title indicating sex and chapters with at least one comment will draw views straight out of the story map.
Should the notifications be updated? Does any one read 100 pages back in there notifications? For the asynchronous readers to come into sync updating the notifications to be more in sync would offer less issues. Perhaps instead of going chapter by chapter updating. An option here is that yes it shows the chapter, but it goes to story map not the chapter itself. We already have blue highlighting the newest chapter(s), so allowing this should reduce the issues above. Just my thought.
To be fair, I have favourite chapters or storylines that I sometimes read again and again while keeping away from the ones I don't care for.
So that's what bookmarks are for. /s My main story is a game story. So chapter to chapter views are generally all over the place with the many different threads intersecting and diverging.
This is one of my personal favorite enigmas, where a branch will dwindle and then all of a sudden jolt back up. I agree that titles play a huge role; I know I've personally opened story maps before and just done a search for particular kinks, especially if the story is very large. And I've seen it personally on my own chapters. Really, it shouldn't be surprising that view count naturally diminishes over a few chapters of a party, then suddenly shoot back up for a chapter entitled "In Which There Are Feelings and Then Fucking".
This is how I do it too. I've actually thought about adding some basic tags to chapter titles to make it easier for people to find the content they want. Knowing someone else makes heavy use of the story map makes me think it might be a decent idea.
It would be good if the tag system make it clearer that a tag was for a specific chapter, rather than just marking the whole story. Like, my story only has one branch with futa in it, and the couple instances of breast expansion would take a while to find, while I could just least the 'run-on sentences' tag for the whole thing.
