MelissaBaby
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And you are a good example of that. You always seem fair and supportive, able to give valuable advice with kindness.
A hell of a lot of stories.
- Thread starter HectorBidon
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And you are a good example of that. You always seem fair and supportive, able to give valuable advice with kindness.
ElectricBlue
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Yes, readers will continue to find your stories. Two of my very earliest submissions from several years ago both got faved in the last week, and I got a new follower too. Who knows how they arrived in my story file after all that time, but there they are.
LoquiSordidaAdMe
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Honestly MB, you should consider submitting My Fall and Rise to an actual publisher. It's a powerful, inspirational story. And don't pigeon hole it as erotica. It could have mainstream appeal.
HectorBidon
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I wonder if the 14th being a Thursday rather than a Sunday might have something to do with it too. Readers don't have as much free time for reading, and the list of new stories is longer so there are more choices to choose from. If only there was a data nerd who could run the numbers. Grrr.
SimonDoom
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I know just the person for that job . . .
MelissaBaby
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Thank you, I appreciate that very much. I've recently reconnected with a friend from high school who is a published author, and we will be getting together when I go home next month to discuss the ins and outs of publishing.
MelissaBaby
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That may very well be a factor. Also, when I look at other authors in the category, those getting a higher number of views have been publishing here much longer than I have, and have build up more of a following.
LoquiSordidaAdMe
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Hey, that's great news, MB! At least from my perspective as a reader, it seemed like you were uncomfortable and felt unwelcome in your hometown, so it's good to hear that you've gotten to a place where you feel like you can go back.
Keep rising.
MelissaBaby
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I'm taking my man to meet my mother, and to reunite with my brother. He and I have been estranged for four years. So, it will be a joyous time no matter what.
LoquiSordidaAdMe
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Part of me wants to volunteer to help with the data collection. If we could get several people contributing to a shared data source, it could be pretty light work, and I'd be interested in the results.
Another part thinks Laurel is right to withhold this data. If I knew that I'd get more readers if my story released on the weekend instead of a weekday, or in the spring instead if the summer, I'd probably start timing my submissions. I don't think I want to play this games.
It's like I want to know, but I think I'm better off not knowing. So conflicted.
LoquiSordidaAdMe
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More great news! The few references to your brother really upset me. I can't imagine losing my siblings from my life like that. So happy for you!
MelissaBaby
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Thanks. We spoke when I called my Mom on Thanksgiving. We have a lot to talk about and some serious issues to resolve, but we are both committed to rebuilding a relationship.
HectorBidon
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(Sorry to interrupt . . . )
As Melissa pointed out, the Romance stories posted on 12/14 got considerably fewer views than the ones posted on 12/10. I wondered whether this was due in part to 12/14 being a Thursday while 12/10 was a Sunday. So I tried to check it out.
Here are the first-two-day view counts for the two batches of stories.
[tr][td].[/td] [td]
Here are the view counts broken out by category. The table shows the average and highest view count in each category. (The averaging was done across all the stories in the category without regard to whether they were stand-alone or chapter). The columns with the * show how many stories stood out by having view counts higher than the overall batch average.
[tr][td].[/td] [td]
These results suggest that there is a weekend effect, but it's not all that big. The 12/14 (Thursday) batch of stories actually got more total views than the 12/10 (Sunday) batch (540k vs 444k). This suggests that readers are reading as much during the week as on weekends.
However, the Sunday batch received more views per story (8076 vs 5044 on average). This is because there were fewer stories on Sunday. The site seems to be putting up about 100 stories on Tuesday through Saturday, but only about half as many on Sunday and Monday. So this suggests that there might be a slight advantage to getting your story published on Sunday (or presumably Monday), as it will face less competition.
This effect can't fully explain the large drop in average Romance views however (8k to 2k). Simon pointed out that one of the stories on 12/10 was an outlier. But even so, there were a total of 34k Romance views on 12/10, but only 12k on 12/14. Do Romance readers stop reading during the week? Is the only way to reach them by having your story published on Sunday?
Here's my theory. Some categories, like I/T and LW, are primarily read by a dedicated base and so receive a fairly consistent number of views every day. Other categories are read non-exclusively by readers who browse across categories. Some days Romance may get more views, other days those views may go elsewhere. So while a new LW story only has to compete against other LW stories, a Romance story has to compete outside its own category as well.
In both batches, there were a few stories that got appreciably more views than the others. The median number of views was about 3k, but a few stories had over 10k, and two had 40k. The highest viewed stories are tabulated in the * columns in the table. To some extent, I think this is a result of views chasing stories. Readers come to read, and they're going to pick something. Sometime a particular story stands out from the other choices and receives a disproportionate number of views. Simon talked about this.
Bottom line. The original results I posted are not necessarily a very good predictor of what can be expected for any particular story in a given category. What they do show is that there are a lot of readers, that every stories does get read, and that it's possible for a story to receive a fairly large number of views in the first few days.
The lesson for authors, I guess, is that every day your story is on the New list, there are a certain number of views out there and they're going to be given either to your story or to somebody else's. You can scheme to attract them. Or you can stumble into them.
Or you can follow Loqui and Melissa's advice and just stop playing the game. The readers who troll the New List aren't necessarily the ones you're trying to reach. You'll continue getting readers after the first week. Choose to believe that the right ones will find you eventually.
As Melissa pointed out, the Romance stories posted on 12/14 got considerably fewer views than the ones posted on 12/10. I wondered whether this was due in part to 12/14 being a Thursday while 12/10 was a Sunday. So I tried to check it out.
Here are the first-two-day view counts for the two batches of stories.
Here are the view counts broken out by category. The table shows the average and highest view count in each category. (The averaging was done across all the stories in the category without regard to whether they were stand-alone or chapter). The columns with the * show how many stories stood out by having view counts higher than the overall batch average.
These results suggest that there is a weekend effect, but it's not all that big. The 12/14 (Thursday) batch of stories actually got more total views than the 12/10 (Sunday) batch (540k vs 444k). This suggests that readers are reading as much during the week as on weekends.
However, the Sunday batch received more views per story (8076 vs 5044 on average). This is because there were fewer stories on Sunday. The site seems to be putting up about 100 stories on Tuesday through Saturday, but only about half as many on Sunday and Monday. So this suggests that there might be a slight advantage to getting your story published on Sunday (or presumably Monday), as it will face less competition.
This effect can't fully explain the large drop in average Romance views however (8k to 2k). Simon pointed out that one of the stories on 12/10 was an outlier. But even so, there were a total of 34k Romance views on 12/10, but only 12k on 12/14. Do Romance readers stop reading during the week? Is the only way to reach them by having your story published on Sunday?
Here's my theory. Some categories, like I/T and LW, are primarily read by a dedicated base and so receive a fairly consistent number of views every day. Other categories are read non-exclusively by readers who browse across categories. Some days Romance may get more views, other days those views may go elsewhere. So while a new LW story only has to compete against other LW stories, a Romance story has to compete outside its own category as well.
In both batches, there were a few stories that got appreciably more views than the others. The median number of views was about 3k, but a few stories had over 10k, and two had 40k. The highest viewed stories are tabulated in the * columns in the table. To some extent, I think this is a result of views chasing stories. Readers come to read, and they're going to pick something. Sometime a particular story stands out from the other choices and receives a disproportionate number of views. Simon talked about this.
Bottom line. The original results I posted are not necessarily a very good predictor of what can be expected for any particular story in a given category. What they do show is that there are a lot of readers, that every stories does get read, and that it's possible for a story to receive a fairly large number of views in the first few days.
The lesson for authors, I guess, is that every day your story is on the New list, there are a certain number of views out there and they're going to be given either to your story or to somebody else's. You can scheme to attract them. Or you can stumble into them.
Or you can follow Loqui and Melissa's advice and just stop playing the game. The readers who troll the New List aren't necessarily the ones you're trying to reach. You'll continue getting readers after the first week. Choose to believe that the right ones will find you eventually.
HectorBidon
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Thanks for your offer, but I think you're right that it probably doesn't make sense to worry overly much about gaming the system. Write good stories, and they'll get read and appreciated.
HectorBidon
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Good luck! I still think publishing your memoir would be a very worthwhile project.
Bramblethorn
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Thanks Hector for doing this work!
In support of this, here's a graph that shows my stories' view counts plotted against how long they've been up. (A few of the earlier stories are missing the beginning, because I didn't start keeping count until partway through my first series.)
You can see that view counts rise sharply in the first week, and then slow down once they fall out of the "New Stories", but they keep on picking up views over time, and every new story boosts the previous ones as readers who liked it go back to check out my other work. After a couple of years, things even out, so no need to sweat the New List stuff too much.
In support of this, here's a graph that shows my stories' view counts plotted against how long they've been up. (A few of the earlier stories are missing the beginning, because I didn't start keeping count until partway through my first series.)
You can see that view counts rise sharply in the first week, and then slow down once they fall out of the "New Stories", but they keep on picking up views over time, and every new story boosts the previous ones as readers who liked it go back to check out my other work. After a couple of years, things even out, so no need to sweat the New List stuff too much.
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ElectricBlue
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What's interesting to me is that the view growth is so uniform regardless of age and view count (even your two crazy high view stories share a common curve), which shows how predictable mass reader behaviour is on Lit.
I don't track aged stats on my story file in anywhere near this detail, but I see the same kind of steady state growth across my stories. I'm curious about my new story blip effect, but I don't record my stats frequently enough to actually see it, time-wise.
Bramblethorn
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Yeah, after about a month the growth rate becomes very steady (except that topmost story, which took about a year to level off, for some reason that I haven't figured out).
Here's a plot of the same data, but by calendar date instead of age. The green curve at the top is the first chapter of my "Stringed Instrument" series, and the lime-green one below it is chapter 2; you can see they get a bit of a bump every time a new chapter appears.
Some of them also made it onto the category toplist, which shows up as a sustained increase in view rate (steeper slope); for example, the light blue curve at about day 1200. This also gives a bit of a boost to earlier chapters, though it's not as obvious.
The dashed-blue-gray curve, which has gained views faster than any of my other stories, is also the lowest scoring. I suspect that's not a coincidence; I wrote a stroke-y blurb for something that wasn't really a stroke-y story, so I got a lot of eyeballs but not the right kind of eyeballs.
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LoquiSordidaAdMe
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Thanks so much for sharing all that work HectorBiden, and Bramblethorn!
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KindofHere
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HectorBidon
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Thanks to you and KindofHere for the data. Your growth rates seem to be about 6 views per day (for Lesbian stories with red H's). KindofHere's are higher: 22/day (EC, red H; EH, red H), 169/day (I/T, red H), 1172/day (I/T, red H, W = 2nd place 2017 contest winner), although his stories are more recent and may still be partly in their initial growth spurt. I haven't kept track of my own stories, but my oldest ones have only gotten 7k views in seven years, which means my growth rates can't be more than 3/day (EC and Rom, no H).
So this all suggests that there is continual interest in stories long after they drop off the New List, and that the intensity of the interest depends on the category, score, and accolades of the story. Still, though, the constancy of the slopes seen awful suspicious. Could there also be some artificial mechanism at work (robots? web crawlers?). I'm not sure how this could explain the different slopes for different stories, though. RejectReality posted a link to even more long-term data, in case anyone out there looking to do a thesis in quantitative pornography wants to delve more deeply.
The hard thing, I guess, is to know whether these continual views translate into reads. Like others, I do occasionally get comments and favoriting on older stories. This mostly comes when I publish something new, but sometimes it just come out of the blue. Also, this only happens for by red H stories, and not even for all of them. Never (or hardly ever) for any of the others.
How do people find old stories? By searching for keywords or titillating phrases, by running down leads on the Feedback Portal (a hit-and-miss but sometimes quite profitable approach), by letting your shields drop on the AH, by following the suggestions in the Similar Stories box at the bottom of a story you like. I've found a lot of older stories that I've enjoyed these ways.
(Does anyone know how the stories are chosen for the Similar Stories box? I presume it's algorithmic, but how does a story get to be a candidate? I've only ever seen one of my stories there, but some standards I see all the time. Seems like e a pretty powerful advertisement for them.)
So, I guess there are games that could be played to position stories favorably for when they come off the New List as well as for when they go on. Still, the best advice is probably just to keep on writing.
RejectReality
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Bots and crawlers are almost certainly included in the views statistic. It's essentially impossible to filter them all out, because even the most comprehensive databases are out of date three seconds after they're updated, and utilizing the whole of such databases would present speed problems on a site with this much traffic.
Evidence indicates that the number of artificial views from such crawlers has decreased a lot in the last couple of years, though. The number of views a story will pick up has declined, but the rest of the activity has not. It's resulting in view to vote ratios that are much higher than they were in the past.
Before the change, which I believe was an update of Lit's bot filter, it was standard for a story to have about a 100:1 view to vote ratio. In most of my recent postings, it's somewhere around 50:1. That sort of change might be possible if I had been unusually active posting new stories, but the opposite is true. I've only just come off a full year of posting nothing.
My most recent is currently sitting at 1900 votes and 90k views, which is right in line. A couple of years ago, I would have expected it to have 190k views with that number of votes. Other recent stories are 120/12k, 1k/62k, 274/31k, 762/45k, 238/15k
Some older works show the difference: 1900/226k, 1900/180k, 314/34k, 1700/210k.
The traffic to the site has also remained more or less steady according to Alexa ( seasonal variance and blips not withstanding ) So it isn't likely that the reduced number of views is caused by change in visitors.
So while there's no way of knowing how many of the currently listed views are bots, I think it's safe to say that the percentage has declined since the ( assumed ) new bot filter was introduced.
Cross-referencing with a site that only counts downloads from members on the same stories, released at approximately the same time, I came up with a number that was an average of 30% bots in the views number here, but that was several years ago. ( Assuming I'm remembering the number correctly. Have no idea where the data is on my HD right now ) I haven't looked at the difference recently.
Evidence indicates that the number of artificial views from such crawlers has decreased a lot in the last couple of years, though. The number of views a story will pick up has declined, but the rest of the activity has not. It's resulting in view to vote ratios that are much higher than they were in the past.
Before the change, which I believe was an update of Lit's bot filter, it was standard for a story to have about a 100:1 view to vote ratio. In most of my recent postings, it's somewhere around 50:1. That sort of change might be possible if I had been unusually active posting new stories, but the opposite is true. I've only just come off a full year of posting nothing.
My most recent is currently sitting at 1900 votes and 90k views, which is right in line. A couple of years ago, I would have expected it to have 190k views with that number of votes. Other recent stories are 120/12k, 1k/62k, 274/31k, 762/45k, 238/15k
Some older works show the difference: 1900/226k, 1900/180k, 314/34k, 1700/210k.
The traffic to the site has also remained more or less steady according to Alexa ( seasonal variance and blips not withstanding ) So it isn't likely that the reduced number of views is caused by change in visitors.
So while there's no way of knowing how many of the currently listed views are bots, I think it's safe to say that the percentage has declined since the ( assumed ) new bot filter was introduced.
Cross-referencing with a site that only counts downloads from members on the same stories, released at approximately the same time, I came up with a number that was an average of 30% bots in the views number here, but that was several years ago. ( Assuming I'm remembering the number correctly. Have no idea where the data is on my HD right now ) I haven't looked at the difference recently.
Bramblethorn
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Yeah, the long-term constancy surprises me a bit. If you'd asked me to predict what these curves would look like, without having seen the data, I'd have expected two things:
#1: Some sort of long-term trend. Maybe increasing (more people and bots using the internet, more readers discovering Literotica?). Maybe decreasing (people move away from a twenty-year-old site to whatever the new big thing is.)
#2: Seasonal patterns. A spike or a slump over the Christmas holidays, around college start/end term dates, etc. etc.
I don't see either of those in my data. It's quite possible that there are weak effects there - I haven't run the numbers, and seasonal in particular would be tricky since my data collection is done at irregular intervals with some big gaps. But certainly not as strong as I would've expected.
That said, along with the views, I do get a reasonably steady pattern of other interactions - votes, favourites, comments - that are unlikely to be bot-related. Maybe Literotica really is an unusually stable site in terms of audience.
I have no inside information, but I would guess some variant of "people who faved/5'ed this story also tended to fave/5 this other story".
ElectricBlue
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That's my take on this - get a big enough mass of humanity doing something on a repeated basis for long enough, and long term patterns and behaviours will invariably emerge. If you could truly understand it, you'd be wealthy beyond a thousand dreams. There's a major study buried away in Lit for a demographers's thesis. I wonder what Bernard Salt would make of it?
(Bernard Salt is an Oz demographer who is slowly trawling through Australia's last census, doing the profiles of "who we are".)
LoquiSordidaAdMe
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