Sharp spike in photo view counts

For the past few weeks, Google Maps indicated that one of my photo has been viewed by 2 millions users. The spike occurred only recently - 1.5M views in Dec and another 500k last week. This doesn’t make any sense.

Does it happen to anyone?

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Hello @VK_Guide

The photo might have been featured. You must have got a notification on that.

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Thanks. I don’t see any notification or email from Google though.

If it’s featured, I’d assume my picture will be on the first photo when I visit the place on Google Maps, but that’s not the case?

Hi @VK_Guide ,

I share your thought that the spike would likely correlate to being the first photo for the listing, but it could also come from being the first photo in one of the sub-categories, like Vibe or Food & Drink.

Also possible is that the photo was briefly number one overall, but has since been replaced by another photo. Is the listing a prominent location? Perhaps there’s just an exceptional amount of traffic.

Hope that helps! :slightly_smiling_face:

Hello @paysin .

Thanks for sharing your thought. It’s not really a prominent one; just some local tourist spot mostly visited by the locals. That’s why it is rather puzzling there are sudden huge spike of interest (2M views!s) during this holiday season. :slightly_smiling_face:

Cheers.

Hello @VK_Guide

To understand the phenomenon clearly, can you please share Maps link to the places where you observed that abnormal spike?

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I just read a report by a fellow local guide on that Facebook he had accumulated 20 million photo views in a single month.

:astonished:

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@C_T Here’s the location. https://goo.gl/maps/fZ7NCsejXufZBQGM9

@JeroenM so i’m not the only one. :slightly_smiling_face: