A lot of open source projects that are using JIRA use the voting mechanism (as a popularity measure) as one of the guidance signals for feature prioritisation.
However in order to be able to vote a user needs to be loggend-in which prevents a lot of users to perform a vote - thats especially the case for users who just came by via a google search.

It would be helpful to have an additional measurement to approximate the popularity of a particular feature request or bug. One such measurement you be simple to expose the hit-count (e.g. how often was this particular issue requested) - this is be a simple measure that should be easy to collect which would improve the "popularity" signal for a particular issue.

It should be possible to see this the hit-count in detail- as well as list-view. It should also be exposed via the REST API.