I haven’t noticed a pattern with views except that they are often frustratingly low. I can speak to the follower issue. I suspected that a large portion of my new followers were not readers. I would get new followers without my views going up. So I did a spreadsheet analysis of every new follower from December and January. Out of 300 or so new followers, only 6% had interacted with any of my stories by clapping, highlighting, or responding. And only 1% had interacted with more than one of my stories.


Then I looked at each of the 300 new followers’ pages and saw a lot of stories that had little to do with what I write about. These were likely people or bots playing a random follow-for-follow attempt.

Of the 300 pages I viewed, about 6% of those people had not written any stories at all. I could assume that they were either readers or bots/people playing a long game of follow-for-follow. But I gave them the benefit of the doubt.

So for 300 new followers, I estimate about 36 new readers. If that pattern holds for me, then I might expect about 240 readers for my 2000 followers. Except I don’t see anywhere near that. I think there is attrition here. So probably readers leave but their profile still exists - like most of my Facebook friends. So maybe my shiny new story will be seen by about 100 people who follow me.

That is where other factors influence how many views I will get - the weather, the title, the image, the time of day I publish, whether it is in a publication, the tags I use, the relevance of the topic, and the algorithm.

I don’t have enough data about the other factors, but I can see some patterns anecdotally. When I publish more often my views go up. When I read and respond to others, my views go up.

It is possible that the constellation of factors that influence views could follow a recurring pattern like you are seeing. It could be like how every twenty minutes or so at a party all the conversations take a dip and it is suddenly quiet for a moment. All the randomness lines up.

I would be surprised actually if all the random features that drive people to view my stories did not have an up-and-down character. If the views were stable from week to week, I might suspect something.