How does posterous count views

That strikes me as being close to the canonical white lie, in response to "Does this dress make me look fat? The key factor is that for a lot of bloggers audience is the reason they blog. Audience is the ROI of the time spent blogging. Someone who thinks they've got thousands of visitors may spend more time blogging rather than spending it with their families or working which they would have done if they only had 10 readers It's even worse if you're using it for a company blog like many startups are doing.

Because your blog page view stats can often become part of investor pitches or sales material to show traction. If you write an advert and say 10, people read your blog when they don't and that influences your customers buying decision, you can be prosecuted for misleading your customers. I think AWStats has a a list of "bot" useragents regexs. I'd probably start there. That said, I know my sites get many thousands of hits from rogue comment spam and email harvesting bots with forged user agents.

They're just counting views in a particularly unrealistic but technically not incorrect way. The test has to be what your users understand that value to mean.

I'm betting almost all Posterous users think they're being read by significantly more people than they actually are. If Posterous can't provide meaningful stats and I appreciate that filtering out bots may be non-trivial then they should just avoid providing stats altogether.

Bad data is worse than no data as it's much more misleading. For a site whose key value proposition is vanity - is it really?

According to the post by James Hong where he mentioned this, they seem to have found a notable increase in user satisfaction with the change. Is it any different from Victoria Secret bras running a cup size or three higher than everyone else, or dress sizes continually shifting downwards, or SAT scores being recentered upwards by points? They indeed fibbed during their campaign about how posterous is better than blog brand x.

Specifically, about tumblr not supporting an email posting option. There are many things that trigger a "view" for a post and a site: viewing the blog triggers a view for all posts visible on that page.

View counts are updated every five minutes. Google Analytics is better at measuring visitors and filtering out impressions triggered by search engine bots, crawlers, or indexers. I've noticed that as soon as I submit a new post to posterous, it gets about 24 views. I'm quite sure those aren't people. Xuzz on Dec 12, prev next [—]. It's a cultural difference. In the US, people refer to the named entity is. In the UK, they refer to the collection of people that make up the entity are.

Interesting, good to know. How do UK speakers deal with non-named entities? Interesting, I didn't know that. I'd have presumed that one would use "is" when referring to the country, and "are" when referring to the group of states. Is this incorrect? The class was getting restless. And the programmer's favourite: The data is corrupt. Sorry to reply to myself, but I actually forgot to put my main point in, which was that British English generally refers to the group itself as the entity, whereas it seems that American English refers to the group elements individually.

I didn't know that difference and was wondering the same thing, thanks. It is funny how that subtle difference made me read the title like five times to understand it.

Terrible title. We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. There are plenty of good substitutes for the popular blogging platform, but you may have to pay.

If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. In , the makers of the ultrasimple blogging service Posterous went on an aggressive recruiting campaign to snatch users from "dying platforms. Anyone who was compelled by that campaign probably regrets it now. After growing quickly for three years, Posterous started struggling and pivoted to become Posterous Spaces, a Google Groups-like discussion app.

When Twitter bought Posterous in the spring of last year , it was widely understood to be an "aquihire," a way for Twitter to absorb the Posterous team. In February of this year, Posterous announced it would be shutting down all blogs after ten weeks. That day is here. The site will shut down sometime today, after which time blogs will no longer be accessible.

After that, all blogs will be permanently erased. More than 60, people were logging into Posterous every day, judging by public data from those who use the site with Facebook, and the site was hosting more than 52 million pages.

People liked Posterous because it was incredibly easy to use. It also had a killer feature: post by email. When it launched in , Posterous was the only blogging service that let users publish posts by emailing the content — including tags, formatting, and images — to a customized address. If you attached a number of images to an email, Posterous would automatically assemble them into a gallery. Posterous had other nifty features too, including the ability to automatically cross-post to Twitter, Facebook, and other services.

It also allowed for custom Javascript. These simple but powerful features attracted a set of fairly serious daily bloggers who are now looking for a replacement. Rarely is there a perfect alternative when a service like Posterous shuts down, but Posthaven is actually Posterous redux.

Posterous cofounder Garry Tan decamped when the startup pivoted, disappointed with the direction it was headed in. He and another Posterous cofounder, Brett Gibson, decided to recreate the blogging platform when they heard Twitter planned to shut it down. The pair has built what they say is a "perfect importer" for Posterous refugees, which transfers URLs, comments, and all types of content intact. Posthaven already offers autopost and is working on building post by email and adding more of the original features.

I want to work on this over the long term. Tan and Gibson are still building out features, so there will be a gap before users can do everything that they used to be able to do with Posterous. But Tan said Posthaven will eventually support galleries, custom Javascript, and maybe a few new things too.

The only free option on the list, WordPress is also a popular choice for Posterous refugees. Even the comments," he wrote in a blog post about the transition. However, Tan said the WordPress importer failed to transfer document files and audio files , and downsized large images to 1, pixels wide. Update : Agarwal said he worked with WordPress to resolve the issues, and now the importer works perfectly except for documents. WordPress is the most popular blogging platform in the world.

Its database of plugins, contributed by independent developers, is also growing all the time. WordPress is not as intuitive or easy to use as many of the other options. Posting by email, for example, requires the user to configure the WordPress installation or use plug-ins. Posterous was built for the traditional reverse-chronological blogger.

However, maybe your needs have evolved. Squarespace manages to be super simple and yet very feature-rich. The gallery tool includes an image editor, the store feature includes a powerful inventory manager, and every site comes optimized for mobile.