Do you care about view counts?

[Arantor]

I'm curious... do you care about the view count on topics?

...as an admin?
...as a content creator looking at your own topics?

 

[Mike30]

Is not that I care, but I find it useful as a way to see how many eyeballs have seen the content. As admin and as a content creator.

 

[Aaron]

If someone had internet issues and had to keep refreshing the page that would show more views so no - it's not accurate. I care more for reactions and posts inside a thread I've posted.

 

[Dismal_Bliss]

For personal curiosity, maybe a little bit.

 

[Husk]

Nope. I didn't even bother adding a view count to mine. I've never bothered looking at them or caring about them on anything else either.

 

[Cedric]

Yes, I often watch which threads has how many views. To know what content is more viewed than the other. Trying to understand if it's the subject or it has certain keywords.

 

[Ravenfreak]

Just a little bit, though I care more about if someone engages with the content more than anything. (Like most of us here of course.) I know on certain forum hosts like Proboards you'll see huge numbers because of bots crawling the site and you can't really pinpoint how many of those views were from real people.

 

[NeoMetallix]

No, in fact I removed them from public view on my forum. I feel it only adds negatively to the forum. No one wants to post something and see 100 views but no one responds. It psychologically effects a person just like many other factors on social media. I also disabled likes and ratings for that same purpose.

Plus it's irrelevant with how many bots crawl the site.

 

[Cory]

For curiosity reasons and to see how popular a topic may be, I find it convenient to view that stat. But, I think it's not necessarily something you need to make your forum succeed or something your members may even care about that much. Content is king, so the reply count is more interesting than the view count.

 

[Cam]

This is something I should probably pay more attention to, but I can't say I've spent much time looking at view counts. I typically pay attention to engagement (replies/reactions/etc).

 

[Empire]

Not really, I care more about the thread switch replies in them hahahaha

Topic views count doesn't matter or what I'm saying is that the amount of views that you may get anyway might not all be real traffic views.

 

[joelr]

I'm curious... do you care about the view count on topics?

...as an admin?
...as a content creator looking at your own topics?

As a content creator, it can be useful to provide relative benchmarking (and I think this is a behavioral nudge that most software can get better at - I hope IPS is reading this). Absolute numbers don't mean anything; is 100 views good, or 10,000 views low? Nobody knows! This is falling into the engagement trap in another manner. You need to provide context and explanation around the numbers, to make it actually useful. It's not about the numbers itself, it's about what the numbers mean. For example,

This post is in the top 50% of all views in the past 30 days.
Your blog was in the top 10 of all views in the last 30 days.
Your topic became more popular in the last 30 days.

 

[Jay™]

The few sites I have currently are just hobby sites so this is something I don't pay much attention to.

 

[Reverie]

When I was purposely using social media to advertise certain links I kept an eye on view numbers because I wanted to see if it make a difference. It's interesting data in my opinion and can help you formulate the value of the content you are posting elsewhere and advertising.

 

[Bluezone777]

I can't say I particularly care about view stats. In fact, I made a point to say I don't care about post and member counts either and with Rapture I had those stats turned off from being shown on the index. The only real "stat" that actually matters is your impact on the people who read your posts and that is something that isn't able to be tracked. Most things that matter usually can't be tracked and counted while so much that is able to be counted and tracked doesn't often matter all that much in the end.

If you are going to do anything with your time on forums and the forums you administrate/staff/ or simply a member of then make it your goal to leave as many people as you can better off then when you found them.