I'm interested in this as well. FFn has a chapter-by-chapter statistics page that lets you see the number of times the work as a whole and individual chapters have been loaded (and blatantly states that even refreshing the page with add another hit) and the number of individual USERS that have clicked on the work\chapter.
I've looked all around AO3 and haven't found anything that lets us know how the hits function works on here, though. (You'd think they'd pop that little tidbit in with the posting section...)
Because it's possible to view an entire work at once on the Archive, we can't accurately keep track of chapter-by-chapter statistics.
On AO3, a hit is registered every time someone clicks on a work to open it, with a few exceptions. If two clicks in a row come from the same IP address (and thus, the same computer) only the first one is registered. Moving between chapters in a work only counts as a single hit, not one per chapter. In addition, if you’re logged in, hits are not counted when you visit your own works.
Hits should be taken as only a very rough estimate of the number of people who have accessed a work. This is especially true if that work has multiple chapters, since it makes a difference whether a person read all the chapters at one sitting, or returned to the work multiple times.
I've passed along the suggestion that hits be better documented to the team currently working on our FAQs.
Thank you very much! That answered my question perfectly, actually! (And that's even better than FFn because theirs only tracks individual users over a 24-hour period, which means if someone reads a story again the next day, it counts again, and the same for the author checking their own story over... Which while flattering and helpful respectively, gives us no truly accurate idea of how popular our fics are.)
And expected lil' snags aside, I love the Archive and am very grateful for all of you guys' hard work on here. Thank you so much for everything!
Comment on Email changes and USER STATS!
CuteCat213 Mon 12 May 2014 11:37PM UTC
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AO3_Support (Official) Tue 13 May 2014 07:11PM UTC
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CuteCat213 Tue 13 May 2014 08:39PM UTC
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