Many exiting platforms have the ability to track (often in several different forms) "eyeballs" on the created content. On YouTube, there is both publicly accessible view-counts, as well as the private watch-time and impressions statistics, On twitter X, There are view counts, as well as impressions and engagements.
While most users don't need to (or even should) care about these numbers (referenced primarily only as view counts moving forward), having the ability to track views is incredibly important for many content creators.
Providing these numbers to the sponsor allows the content creator to prove to the sponsor that they did the expected work (some deals will even have minimums and or bonuses based on views), and that the sponsors money was well spent. This not only protects the content creator, but also leads to the ability to get future deals with that sponsor.
Attachments
As an example, the following are viewership numbers on twitter X that were specifically requested by & given to a sponsor after a sponsorship deal.
Describe Alternatives
Sponsored posts can/will often include tracking links, but click-throughs thereof are a very end-of-funnel metric, and not every sponsor has them (around 1 in 5 have them as a VERY rough estimate). Sometimes this is for technical reasons (just not having set up the tracking), sometimes for practical reasons (such as not advertising something that can easily be linked to).
It is possible to roughly infer view counts through other metrics such as likes/reposts/comments, but every platform, user, and even post will have different ratios of those numbers. (Hank Green's Post shows these ratios well) As such, especially given the growth of bsky, inferring bsky numbers based on a post on another platform is fraught with uncertainty.
Additional Context
Many platform have views shown publicly, but this can often exasperate already existing problems with social media such as view chasing encouraging inflammatory posts, or users getting hyper-focused on their view-count and having negative mental reactions due to low views.
In my opinion, these issues lead me to believe that view counts should be private by default, (if not completely private), and potentially have tracking of views in some way disabled unless specifically enabled by the end user.
I suspect that the distributed nature of bsky/atproto, and the high cardinality of view-counts would make tracking views incredibly difficult. The only potential suggestion I have (I have little knowledge on the protocol so it may be incompatible) is to track views on each instance separately, and have the instances push view-count totals to the posting instance every so often (every X minutes) which then aggregates them to get the final total.
There is potential (and motive) for view count fraud here, so having the original instance keep the numbers for each other instance separate may allow users/sponsors to remove potentially harmful instances/views from bots etc. from the totals.
Describe the Feature
Many exiting platforms have the ability to track (often in several different forms) "eyeballs" on the created content. On YouTube, there is both publicly accessible view-counts, as well as the private watch-time and impressions statistics, On
twitterX, There are view counts, as well as impressions and engagements.While most users don't need to (or even should) care about these numbers (referenced primarily only as view counts moving forward), having the ability to track views is incredibly important for many content creators.
Providing these numbers to the sponsor allows the content creator to prove to the sponsor that they did the expected work (some deals will even have minimums and or bonuses based on views), and that the sponsors money was well spent. This not only protects the content creator, but also leads to the ability to get future deals with that sponsor.
Attachments
As an example, the following are viewership numbers on
twitterX that were specifically requested by & given to a sponsor after a sponsorship deal.Describe Alternatives
Sponsored posts can/will often include tracking links, but click-throughs thereof are a very end-of-funnel metric, and not every sponsor has them (around 1 in 5 have them as a VERY rough estimate). Sometimes this is for technical reasons (just not having set up the tracking), sometimes for practical reasons (such as not advertising something that can easily be linked to).
It is possible to roughly infer view counts through other metrics such as likes/reposts/comments, but every platform, user, and even post will have different ratios of those numbers. (Hank Green's Post shows these ratios well) As such, especially given the growth of bsky, inferring bsky numbers based on a post on another platform is fraught with uncertainty.
Additional Context
Many platform have views shown publicly, but this can often exasperate already existing problems with social media such as view chasing encouraging inflammatory posts, or users getting hyper-focused on their view-count and having negative mental reactions due to low views.
In my opinion, these issues lead me to believe that view counts should be private by default, (if not completely private), and potentially have tracking of views in some way disabled unless specifically enabled by the end user.
I suspect that the distributed nature of bsky/atproto, and the high cardinality of view-counts would make tracking views incredibly difficult. The only potential suggestion I have (I have little knowledge on the protocol so it may be incompatible) is to track views on each instance separately, and have the instances push view-count totals to the posting instance every so often (every X minutes) which then aggregates them to get the final total.
There is potential (and motive) for view count fraud here, so having the original instance keep the numbers for each other instance separate may allow users/sponsors to remove potentially harmful instances/views from bots etc. from the totals.