Experiment IV - An Excercise In Monitoring Vocal Reads
When Your Vocal Reads Drop You Want To Know Why
Very Low Reads On Vocal
I am always looking for greater insight into things and the problem above is something that has slightly bothered. Firstly I know from interactions with my Vocal audience and people outside of my Vocal audience that my stories are being read.
The paranoia in me says that Vocal doesn’t see my stories for inclusion in Top Stories and part of the reason they can validly ignore me is that nobody reads my stories anyway. Two recent pieces called A Poet? And Magica Nomina have had several likes and positive comments in the Facebook Vocal Groups but between them, a dozen reads. The first is prose and the second is a poem.
The Problem Is
Identifying how Vocal reads are calculated is a very black box that we have no access to at all. So everything is guesswork. We can see that Vocal Stats are flawed, so that then reinforces the conjectures that something else may not be working as expected. Poems are much shorted than prose pieces so is time the only thing that is taken into consideration when someone reads a Vocal story.?
We have to be thankful that supposedly all reads, whether from Vocal readers or external readers are counted, unlike platforms like Medium where only member reads count (correct me if I am wrong with that statement).
In a lot of my work, I try to minimise the points of failure and the problem with computers is that things have to jump through wires, wifi, signals firewalls, the software allowing the audience to read and the software actually doing the counting. That is a lot of potential points of failure that I have listed and we don’t know what is in the box that Vocal has for recording the reads of our stories.
And This Is The Experiment
On my own computer, there is just me and I do like to keep cookies and passwords so that I can go into whatever I am doing without putting my user id, and password and getting a text on my phone with a code to reinput to continue. Even that is fraught with points of failure. I once had an issue with Amazon when trying to set up my Kindle Publisher account because it wouldn’t send a text to my phone (it said it had but I never got it, time after time). I resolved it using someone else's phone number but as you can see, points of failure occur everywhere.
So I went to my local library in Fenham to use their computers to see if reads would be recorded. As I have not used these computers for years there should be nothing for Vocal’s software to identify me with so reads should show up as an anonymous reader.
There are a couple of stories with low reads that have not moved for a while, so I targetted them, so I would be able to see any change. Hopefully, the day after would show something had changed.
After my time yesterday, the stories I had targeted showed no change but that may just be because individual information updates do not show immediately. I had about 35 reads overall which is significantly higher than the ten I have been getting on a daily basis, so the overall may have gone up but the individual stats haven’t.
Experiment IV - A Vocal Read Conclusion
So the experiment may or may not have been a success, but I intend to go out again and try the same thing and keep monitoring the results.
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Very well written. Keep up the good work!
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Comments (6)
I haven't done any research into this. But I have noticed that sometimes the reads I see in the Vocal stats does not seem to match up with the supposed reads I am getting from social media. Maybe there are people in these groups that are saying they're reading but they really aren't.
It’s always interesting to read your observations about reads, Mike. Vocal reads are a mystery that I honestly haven’t put enough effort into understanding.
I wonder if someone doesn’t stay long enough on the page, if it won’t count as a read. Also, I know many times Vocal doesn’t update the daily stats so… daily
I wonder if people are reading on their phone and it not being logged in to Vocal? Would that impact the reds?
Interesting idea about going to the library🤔. Enjoyed this piece, some helpful insight.
Glad you did this observation, but I also found my own.