Cultivate visibility because attention is the currency. - Chris Brogan

You're spot on, Chris!

Now it's gonna be hard to 'measure' visibility if we don't know how many people are actually looking into our stories, don't you think? Since a couple of days I'm missing the 'view counter' on the bottom right of my blog posts that indicates the number of generated page views.

The counter's a great tool to estimate one's leverage with regards to influence and also gives some valid information about the voters/readers ratio (how many of those who upvoted are actually opening the article?).

Are you also fan of the view counter? Then let's spread the word to get it back :-)

Picture found on pixabay.com

Visibility is key - but only if you can measure it

To bloggers visibility is absolutely essential.

We have uncountable tools to make some noise and get ourselves into the spot light. Now, obviously one of the most important parts of our job is to know how successful our doings are, which are the topics that generate attention (traffic) and which are the ones that don't, how many users have upvoted and how many have actually 'looked inside' a specific piece of content.

I remember that there have been written whole blog posts about the traffic 'trending topics' are able to bring to this platform.

Just think about @wadepaterson's 20 questions with John Goehrke (the guy who landed a date with Genie Bouchard).

As you can see from the comments, the view counter of this one was almost exploding:

How can we even know if a piece of content got viral without a view counter?

As you can see from the above copied conversation, the interview with John Goehrke reached more than 13,000 views within a very short time frame.

Having these numbers available is a GREAT way to measure the success of a story and like that implement an impactful strategy to generate waves of organic traffic.

The example above brought a lot of visitors from the outside to steemit.com which means that the article wasn't only successful in terms of visibility within the Steem eco-system but also on the whole internet.

Ultimately, these viral monsters are even a great marketing tool for steemit.com!

That's why I believe that a 'view count feature' is an indispensable tool for steemit and actually any blogging network.

Why did this 'performance indicator' disappear though?

I've read that it's quite prone to abuse. But is that really the reason why it was completely taken off of the application?

By the way I'm not the first one talking about it. For instance, one week ago @emrebeyler asked View count feature is gone. Why it was a bad thing? In this article I learned for the first time that the views of our blog posts are actually not an information that is stored in the blockchain. Weird! Why not?

It seems that one argument to kill the feature was the fact that it can be easily manipulated. Would this be the same if we had the data stored in the blockchain? Or are we talking about bots opening the blog posts and artificially increasing the numbers like that? Couldn't these repeated actions be blocked, limiting the views to '1 per account / IP address / ...' ?

Whatever the reasons were to take it down, it'd be great to know more about it.

What you do think? Do you miss the counter? Let me know in the comments!

Much love,
Marly -

PS: Thanks to everybody who's actually openened and read this blog post!! I can't see how many you are, but I feel you're a couple of them :-)

Thanks for your valuable time!
This blog was launched at the end of July 2016
aiming to provide stories for open-minded
people who enjoy living on the edge of their lives,
stepping out of comfort zones, going on adventure,
doing extreme sports and embracing the new.
Welcome to the too-much-energy-blog!

PS: Information is power.

Original content. Quote found on brainyquote.com.