8L Stats: Average rating by category and page length

[FifthEstate]

I agree with this, and it's an important point.

No matter what system you choose, it will have holes and imperfections. We have no idea what a "view" means in terms of real reads, except that we know that "reads" are some unknown fraction of "views." What we DO know is that there's a correlation, and if the view system is consistent then we at least have a basis for comparing one number with another. If I know that 100,000 people have viewed my story, I don't know how many have read it. But I know to a certainty that more people have read it than a story that has 10,000 views. That's all we need to know. The numbers are always going to be noisy and fuzzy. Relative value is the only value that counts, and that weighs in favor of consistency.

 

[Britva415]

I posted this in the Ratings thread and am reposting it for those people who didn't see it there.

Ratings are strongly influenced by category and page length
View attachment 2288599
The first number is what percentage of all stories published in that category have that many pages. The second number is the average rating for that category and number of pages. This is for stories published from 8/30 to 10/13, 28 days after they were published. So 55% (39 out of 71) of the stories published in Anal from 8/30 to 10/13 were 1 page in length. Those one-page stories had an average rating of 4.28 on 28 days after they were published.

In my simplistic nerdish brain, I think that authors would be grateful for me providing this kind of information. You want to know how you are doing compared to average? Here you go! But when I think more on it, I can see this kind of information pissing off a lot of authors. "I have a 4.67 rating on my three-page Gay Male story, and you're telling me that's below average? Fuck off, asshole!"

Wow, almost 3/4 of Novels and Novellas are three pages or less.

EDIT: I guess probably because of serialized ones.

 

[SimonDoom]

Wow, almost 3/4 of Novels and Novellas are three pages or less.

EDIT: I guess probably because of serialized ones.

Yes, that's probably because they are publishing novels in the form of many short chapters.

It's a terrible tactical error, but it's common.

 

[Constories]

I think the LW stories are low because some readers go there just to vote low and comment on how the wife should have been drawn, quartered, and her head put on a pike in the town square.

I'm not saying that you're completely wrong... but here is some evidence suggesting otherwise. (Plus I just love when people read this story lol)

Just look at the comments. Most are definitely on the side of the wife.

 

[Sinstories]

Data is fun, good stuff.

However, you must be careful with data because it can lie.

I'm not going to dispute the conclusions based on my observations, but, I will provide some other possible explanations of the variance based on what I have seen.

I have posted a few stories over a long period of time (3 years between chapters is a bit excessive, I know ) but I see more of a correlation in scores to quality of writing (my first stuff was bad and the ratings were as well) and to the amount of sexual activity in the story (more sex better scores).

Assuming the quality of my writing and storytelling is consistent (not counting the first couple that were bad), I receive much higher ratings when the stories are less story and more sex. You could argue that different categories lend themselves to more sex, thus driving the variation OR certain subjects may attract more novice writers thus impacting the quality of the writing. It's also possible that my writing of sexual scenarios is better than my writing of situation and dialog, there are a lot of variables involved and the only way to really know is to collect data on the why of ratings.

Another interesting data question would be the number of views by category, though that would definitely be skewed by whether or not a story is part of a series and if so, where in the series it sits. My experience (3 series) is that there is a 50% drop in views from Ch 1 to Ch 2, the next 2 or 3 are relatively stable, then another big drop. But, for the first chapters, I have seen double the views for incest vs erotic couplings (very small sample size obviously).