Analysis of image views per day: what can we conclude?

[raid]

I checked out my smugmug account to see which images were viewed the most so that I can get an idea about the type of images that people seem to be looking at. I was very surprised to find the most viewed images were three images of my WWII camera that now is donated to the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola. The other surprise to me was the fact that the referring website is not rangefinderforum.com but is leicaplace.com where I posted these three images.
To give you an idea of the interest in these three images, there are more than 13000 views of each image since January 1 2016 and until today.

Since leicaplace is a small website, how do "other people" reach my three images? Below is a chart for the daily views for one image.

I can understand the interest in a camera with such a history. It is the first American 3D camera (patented), in addition to having documentation as being used in WWII over Japan for choosing cities for the A-bombs.

 

[raid]

https://www.leicaplace.com/threads/...w-in-naval-aviation-museum-in-pensacola.1387/

This is the website.

 

[rscheffler]

Just guessing, but some of it might be 'robots' or 'spiders' from search engines that 'crawl' websites looking for content and/or updates. I believe those count as hits the same way as regular 'human' page views.

From viewing analytics for my own website, there seem to be a lot of this kind of indexing going on (though I have left robot-specific instructions to specifically exclude indexing jpeg files).

There are likely other websites that have linked to that forum post, just as you have done above. However, since you don't have access to leicaplace.com's analytics, you won't know if this is the case, and if so, how many refer to that page with your images. I was also thinking some others might be hot-linking to your images (the images load on other websites), but I would guess that would appear in your smugmug stats. Another consideration is how smugmug counts hits/visits. I seem to recall Flickr at one point changed how they classify image views, which resulted in dramatically higher view counts.

 

[Ko.Fe.]

Google search requests for gear.
I have same situation with view record for picture with Leica gear.

 

[raid]

I have many other images posted at smugmug and at leicaplace, but their views are small numbers. It is these three images only that display this traffic. Maybe the museum has linked them somehow to their exhibit of the camera.

The number of views for one of the 3 images jumped from 85 to 252/day after I posted the link to leicaplace here.

 

[marcr1230]

The background story of your camera is really interesting Raid - Thanks for posting

 

[raid]

Thank you Marc. It was a very interesting adventure for me.