Cheeky litte Posterous | Hacker News Reader

Cheeky litte Posterous

fabiodebe.com

17 pointsOoTheNigerian10 comments

They probably include views by bots and crawlers. That is pretty typical amongst UGC sites.

For those that didn't know (I didn't): UGC = user-generated content.

I wonder if Posterous is also aggregating all "views" of a post, not just individual page views to that post. So, for example, the "Page View" count in Posterous could include views from your homepage, archives, rss and permalink page.

I have noticed this as well, but haven't looked too much into it. I trust Google Analytics more anyways.

Pretty sure you're right. So following on what you said, if someone views the index page of a posterous blog that would count as a view of all 10 posts listed.

Quite a strange methodology. I wouldn't call it dishonest, but its certainly unorthodox.

From flipping between the management console and my blog homepage a few times, that seems to be exactly what's going on. It's also a bit disappointing (though not surprising) that it doesn't drop hits from the admin user.

I covered the topic here:

http://blog.awesomezombie.com/2010/12/are-posterous-fudging-...

Discussed on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1995919

Posterous count bot/crawler visits, although the posterous founder responded on that thread, he refused to answer the question about it misleading users.

Yeah, Posterous numbers always seemed to be inflated. I once tried posting my blog link using Bit.ly URL shortner as it also offers analytics for clicks per hour. But Bitly's stats were way less compared to what Posterous was showing during few hours of observation. Unfortunately I didn't do more analysis, but from that point onwards, I started not to believe in Posterous' numbers.

I recall reading somewhere that they tried to fix the inflated view counts and users revolted. Known issue I guess.

Yeah, isn't this story from at least a couple weeks ago? They count hits, not visits or pageviews, was the conclusion.

Your random average blogger is probably psyched to see that there are a couple hundred views on all of their posts, which makes them think that Posterous is way better than any other blogging platform they've tried. It's a little disingenuous for technical people who understand the difference, but your average person probably doesn't care and just likes the ego boost.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com