Recently, I crossed 30 million views on my Google Maps account, and while this milestone seems incredible, I can’t help but question its authenticity. Are these viewership numbers truly genuine, or are they a strategy to encourage contributors like me to upload more content?
Here’s why I’m skeptical: After uploading an image, I’ve noticed the view count often jumps by 14–15 views within a second. With so much content already available on the platform, it feels unlikely that an image would gain that many views instantly. Despite the high overall view count, I receive notifications for images with just 40–50 views. Shouldn’t notifications prioritize images with thousands of views if the numbers are accurate? Or could it be that the numbers displayed for highly-viewed images are inflated, and the lower counts reflect actual engagement?
If the viewership numbers are indeed accurate, then it’s an exciting achievement, but these discrepancies make me wonder. What do you think? Have you experienced anything similar? Let me know your thoughts!
Hi @deadly96 , first of all welcome to Connect, the home of Local Guides.
Your questions are interesting, and even if they are not two, I think they deserve to be analyzed.
When did this observation of yours date back? This hasn’t happened for about a year now, an image starts showing views only after a few days, and the way of counting views seems to have changed. Regarding those almost instantaneous views, the most likely hypothesis is that they were views made by the AI that verifies and filters our images. After the change, which “froze” the views for almost a month, sometimes the opposite happens to me: I get likes on images that still show zero views.
For Maps, small businesses, or those with few photos, are more important than those with many visitors. Therefore, we are encouraged to add images especially in those places.
The numbers are not inflated. Consider that our images are not only shown in the listings. For example, if you explore an area in Google Maps, you are shown the most relevant images recently added to the various listings. Furthermore, through a Maps API there are websites that show our reviews and photos, obviously respecting the copyright (our profile is shown together with the image). This means that views can grow, sometimes even quickly.
To give you a particular example, some time ago I took a photo of a medical center where swabs for COVID were being done. It was the beginning of the pandemic, the place had very few photos and mine had been chosen as the cover photo of the place. In a very short time I exceeded half a million views for that image. Then everyone started doing swabs, and the speed of increase in views slowed.
Hello @deadly96,
I noticed the same for each and every uploaded photo before February 7, 2024. At that day the view counts of many, if not all photos dropped and nothing moved until early March, as @ErmesT mentioned. Then we noticed slow increasing, but never again within a second after uploading. About 30% of my photos did not see any increase during this year, very few show views within 12 hours after posting, some after several days or weeks and many don’t show any views at all yet.
Several local guides noticed the average daily increase of the total views dropped by 50% compared to last year. I did not track those in the past, so I cannot confirm.
Several users were guessing the same and it sounds reasonable to me when I watch the slow increase of views of the photos I posted before February, However, the question remains, what exactly is counted and what is not. For that, I did not see any response by Google.
After uploading an image, I’ve noticed the view count often jumps by 14–15 views within a second. With so much content already available on the platform, it feels unlikely that an image would gain that many views instantly.
Despite the high overall view count, I receive notifications for images with just 40–50 views. Shouldn’t notifications prioritize images with thousands of views if the numbers are accurate? Or could it be that the numbers displayed for highly-viewed images are inflated, and the lower counts reflect actual engagement?