Preface
I have requested a feature to show the amount of views per post on steemit, but in the meantime i wanted to make known a work around / solution that maybe of some use to content creators to better guage the traction of their post. if you believe this feature would be valuable please visit my post HERE and make yourself known.
Why is tracking post views useful?
Upvotes and Downvotes are a good measure of tracking the people that liked or disliked your post, but not everyone votes on content they have viewed; some people remain on the fence and abstain from voting altogeather. it is these people and the voters as a whole that we are looking to capture.
Tracking views via your image host
Some image hosts track the number of views on your image; it is this feature that we can use to track views per post. by simply using an image host that has this feature and embedding your 'tracked' image within your post you can always go back to your image hosting provider and see the details relating to your views.
Tracking is bad and may be frowned upon
I agree that some forms of tracking (as detailed HERE) will not be viewed in a positive light; for example using and image host that tracks and display's the ip addresses of your viewer. But the host i will share with you does no such thing; all that is displayed is the number of views and the country in which most of your views originated from.
Image hosts
So looking around a found a couple of nice looking image hosts that provide metrics on views per page i have detailed these hosts below.
https://beeimg.com is a simple that allows you to host images with or without and account and tracks the views per page and country where most views originated from. i have tested and the images work with Steemit and is a great way to get some extra info out of your post.
http://gitimg.com/ sadly (i am quite upset) GitIMG does not seem to function any more and will not let me sign up for an account, there github has no recent activity and the project seems to have been removed..
The site looked really great with basic account being able to host images and get page views but also plot the time of access on a chart giving you useful information regarding the life span of views over time. it also had a page count widget that dynamically updated. sad story but if anyone knows of and comparable service please let me know in the comments
How do i use this method with https://beeimg.com
All you need to do is upload an you image to beeIMG and then embed it as normal in your Steemit post and note down the URL to the image page (not the image it self) and then anytime in the future you can go back to that page and see the view count or your image, which if exclusivly posted to Steemit equates to your views per page :)
One thing to note is you need to make this image at least the second image in your post otherwise it will be used as the steemit summary image and the count will not be accurate as the count will increment with every new user who load the main page and not nessasseraly your post
Conclusion
I hope that view tracking will be integrated into the Steemit in due time, but for the time being is see image hosts with view tracking as a good work around to gauge your reader base. if this number is compared with the number of votes received you can gauge your impact on the community.
There are most likely many other image host providing this sort of data but these are the one i found; and as noted above gitimg does not seem to be an active project anymore which is sad as it looked like a great platform.
Dan has mentioned his intention to block tracker pixels in a comment to the post linked above; in my mind the only way to do this is to block image hosting from external platforms; this means this method will not work for ever but at least until the feature is implemented we can get some stats on your viewers without being intrusive to their privacy.