Staff Blog / Let's clarify some stats issues

When we launched v5, we failed to get all the Stats features taken care of. Honestly, I think we sort of lost interest in keeping track of them -- at least, that's how I felt, because I was focused on watching videos and testing the site. But after uploading a few new videos that I am proud of, I can now say that I miss the thrill of watching my number of Views climb. I don't pursue "Views" directly, nor at any cost. I frown upon the moronic behavior of urging strangers CHECK OUT MY VIDS. Vimeo is well-organized; you generally don't see videos unless you're searching them out, or have asked for them in some way (for example, by subscribing to all videos your friend Likes). So a View on Vimeo is usually well-earned, and is something to be proud of. After releasing something you're proud of, it's nice to know what sort of impact it's having.

The first clarification: a few Stats features are missing. The first is on the Video page, where you should see a breakdown, by day, for that video, of how many Views it had and which referring URLs have sent traffic to it. We hope to have this fixed no later than the beginning of next week. The second is on the Home page, where, when logged-in, you should see stats for your videos from the past few days. We aim to have that restored by the end of next week.

The second clarification is that the numbers of Views have not been increasing for the past few days. All that data is stored safely in our logs, but there was a "clog" in processing those logs. We are currently unclogging it and all up-to-date stats should be restored by the end of the day today. I'm especially eager to see data on my own videos. Well, not especially - only. Thanks to Tommy Smith and James Boyk for bringing this to my attention. Also, we're building better tools for monitoring the conditions that cause the clog.

A third clarification is that a View is now counted by someone actually hitting Play on your video, whether on Vimeo.com or embedded in another website. Previously, a View was the number of times someone loaded your video page, and did not include embeds. In my opinion, this is a huge improvement because now Views have more meaning. This should be bad news for anyone who pursues high numbers of Views as its own goal. I'm not sure that many, if any, of those people are Vimeo users.

A final issue that doesn't have to do with Stats: "Your subscriptions" in the Inbox on the Home page was not updating properly; many videos which should have appeared there did not. We fixed it this morning after I noticed complaints in the forums.

As usual, I will read all and respond to some of the comments below.