rtMedia View Counter

Enabling this addon allows you to display the number of times a media item has been viewed by registered users, and when.

Enable View Count

To use this feature, the site admin first needs to enable the Enable view count feature from rtMedia Display settings.

Where it will be displayed

View counts are visible to all users, including non logged-in users. Media owners will additionally be able to see who viewed their media and how long back.

This provides a way for media owners to see their audience, making it a great addition for websites that have a lot of content creators.

How the media counts are calculated

Counts are not based on IP addresses or cookies of viewers. Instead, use user-ids to tract views. Thus, the view count will only increase when a logged in user views the media for the first time. In other words, the view count will be incremented a single time regardless of the number of times user views any media.

An example of how view counts are managed:

• Number of registered users on a site: 5
• User 1 uploads “media1” -> View Count : 1
• “media1” viewed by 4 other registered users -> View Count : 5
• User 1 re-visits “media1” -> View Count : 5

The addon has been intentionally designed to operate in this way. We believe this gives users a more accurate representation of the popularity of their media files than pure “viewed” numbers, that can easily be fooled by a simple script.

• A non-registered user now views “media1” -> View Count : 6
• Another non-registered user views “media1” -> View Count : 6

The view count will increment by 1 only for the first time that a non-registered user views it, after which it will not increment regardless of views from other non-registered users. We believe that incrementing the view count more than once for a non-registered users adds no information for the media owner.