It’s been a week since I posted Getting Views is Like Pulling Teeth in which I complained that since the reader went all to hell my view count has gone down, so I thought I’d post a follow-up on the conclusions I’ve come to.

As Chris McMullen (http://chrismcmullen.wordpress.com/) pointed out, the new pop-up window in the reader does seem to provide us with what counts as a view. I know this because I’m now getting as many views as I am ‘likes.’ This is something they’ve fixed recently, obviously, because last week when I posted, I wasn’t. I’d be happy to know if anyone else is finding the same result.

But at the same time I’m finding my views per visitor as dropped substantially and I think this is really where the problem lies. While it’s great to have lots of views for the post we just published, the pop-up window still discourages people from visiting our sites, from following, and from seeing what else we have to offer. It’s especially damaging for those of us who are selling something on our websites, particularly if we’ve paid for the site in order to do just that.

I encourage everyone who has a problem with this to complain.  Here is the link to the forum which discusses it: http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/reader-changed?replies=284

They have already addressed the issue of my initial complaint, (not to me personally) which was to please put the word count back in the reader for each post. If you click on the word count, now that it’s back, you bypass the pop-up window and go straight to the original site. If you click on the title of the post, you get the pop-up window. However, if the post is short and doesn’t have any more words than fit in the reader preview, it’s obviously not an option – you just get the pop-up.

I did change my reader view to “Read full post…” and I believe that has helped my view count at least. You can do this by going here, and I quote: “In your dashboard go to Settings/Reading and then scroll down to “For each article in a feed, show”. Select either Full Text or Summary.” Thanks to mewhoami (http://mewhoami.wordpress.com/) for this tip.

Anyone who is still following this thread and is still interested in this topic, I’d love to know if you’ve made or seen any changes in the past week and have come to the same conclusions, or if you plan to write and mention your dissatisfaction with this awful ‘improvement’, in the forums. I think the more we talk about this issue with Word Press, the more we’re likely to have something done about it.

Thanks very much for being on board with me on this. 🙂