What gets counted

Analytics is built to answer "is this working?" without watching anyone. This page lists exactly what is counted, what is left out, and what is never stored.

• A view is one time someone opens your link. Opening it again later is another view.
• People counts distinct visitors, worked out from a hashed IP address. Two people on the same network can count as one person, and one person on two networks as two.
• Returning people opened the link on at least two different days.

Each open also starts a reading or watching session, which records how far people got. A session is kept only once it has at least 2 seconds of active time, or the visitor played some media.

Active time counts a second only while the tab is visible and the reader did something in the last minute, or while media is playing. A tab left open in the background doesn't add time.

• Yours. When you're signed in, your own views of your own links aren't counted at all. If you open your link while signed out, Markdrop can't tell it's you, and the view counts.
• Your workspace's members. For an item in a workspace, views from its members are recorded as internal and hidden by default. On the item's Audience tab, turn off Hide views from Acme members to include them. The home board, live view and CSV downloads always leave them out.
• Bots and crawlers. Requests that identify as bots, crawlers or scripts aren't counted.
• Link previews. When Slack, LinkedIn, WhatsApp or another app fetches your link to show a preview, it's counted under Share signals, not as a view.

If a visitor's browser sends Global Privacy Control, Markdrop sends no reading or watching data for them at all. Their visit still counts as a view, but without where they came from.

You see totals and patterns. You never see who someone is, their IP address, or a list of individual visitors.

• Countries with fewer than 5 people are grouped as Other. Campaigns are grouped the same way.
• Live view shows only countries and device types, never who someone is.
• Devices are coarse, like "phone" and the browser's name.

• Raw IP addresses. Markdrop stores a salted hash of the IP address, never the address itself.
• Copied text. For a code block, Markdrop counts that it was copied and which block it was, using a hash of the block. What readers copy is never stored. Other text selections aren't tracked.
• Anything typed, and the query strings or fragments of links people click. For clicked links, only the host and path are kept.
• Content of encrypted documents. For an end-to-end encrypted document, only time and how far people scrolled are recorded.

Markdrop looks up an approximate location from the IP address when a view comes in. It stores the country, region and city with the view, and shows you countries only.