Questions

[Anton25]

1. Does anyone know the number of stories in Literotica?

2. …..the average number of new stories, which are added everyday?

3. ……the number of readers in L as of now?

 

[pink_silk_glove]

And "what is the meaning of life?" and "how does one attain inner peace?" yadayadayada, blahblahblah.

The answer of course is 42.

Although one could go to the new list and count back the stories until today's date changes into yesterday's. That would answer the second question at least. As far as the others, really don't know if it's possible to know, but there are some stat freak geeks around who might have some insight. Ask 8letters perhaps.

 

[TheRedChamber]

1. Typing 'a' into the search bar for story search nets you 631658 stories. Typing 'the' gets you 631240. There are probably not many more English language stories than that on Lit. I don't know if there's a fast way to estimate non-English stories as well.
2. Some stats I pulled from the site back in July last year suggested 2426 stories published in 2 weeks or 173 a day. This varies, if the owners are busy this number seems to drop.
3. Don't know of an easy way to estimate this. It's possible to get an average number of viewers (e.g. clicks on a story) for each individual story after it's been published for a day or a week, but I don't know how many stories the average reader reads and so that doesn't match 'number of Lit visitors'.

 

[StillStunned]

1. Typing 'a' into the search bar for story search nets you 631658 stories. Typing 'the' gets you 631240. There are probably not many more English language stories than that on Lit. I don't know if there's a fast way to estimate non-English stories as well.

Of my 26 stories, 15 have neither "a" nor "the" in the title.

 

[TheRedChamber]

Of my 26 stories, 15 have neither "a" nor "the" in the title.

Yes, but I'm not searching the title, I'm searching the whole text.

 

[StillStunned]

Yes, but I'm not searching the title, I'm searching the whole text.

Ah, well yes, that would probably work.

 

[mildlyaroused]

So there are stories out there that don't contain a single 'the' at all. Impressive!

 

[TheRedChamber]

So there are stories out there that don't contain a single 'the' at all. Impressive!

Discovered the wrinkle. Audio stories don't have a word limit and there are about 1400 stories for the search 'a -the' nearly all audio.

 

[Anton25]

1. Typing 'a' into the search bar for story search nets you 631658 stories. Typing 'the' gets you 631240. There are probably not many more English language stories than that on Lit. I don't know if there's a fast way to estimate non-English stories as well.
2. Some stats I pulled from the site back in July last year suggested 2426 stories published in 2 weeks or 173 a day. This varies, if the owners are busy this number seems to drop.
3. Don't know of an easy way to estimate this. It's possible to get an average number of viewers (e.g. clicks on a story) for each individual story after it's been published for a day or a week, but I don't know how many stories the average reader reads and so that doesn't match 'number of Lit visitors

Interesting!

 

[TheRedChamber]

Actually if you add together a search for 'the' 631240 with a search for '-the' 2723 you get 633,963 stories in total.

 

[Bamagan]

For the record, adding the numbers associated with the categories on the main story page, which is a rounded estimate to the nearest hundred of the total number of stories in those categories, yields an estimate of about 632,500 stories, which seems to track with the search method.

According to this site, Lit has received about 65m visits in the last month with an average of about 9 pages per visit, suggesting about 7 million users, although not all of those will be unique users, and I don't think there's an easy way to break it down between obsessive authors who visit multiple times per day and casual readers who visit once or twice a week. And the last 30 days are not necessarily representative of any long-term trends, of course. Final caveat, I have no way of knowing how accurate their estimated numbers are, so don't assume they're gospel.

 

[Anton25]

1. Typing 'a' into the search bar for story search nets you 631658 stories. Typing 'the' gets you 631240. There are probably not many more English language stories than that on Lit. I don't know if there's a fast way to estimate non-English stories as well.
2. Some stats I pulled from the site back in July last year suggested 2426 stories published in 2 weeks or 173 a day. This varies, if the owners are busy this number seems to drop.
3. Don't know of an easy way to estimate this. It's possible to get an average number of viewers (e.g. clicks on a story) for each individual story after it's been published for a day or a week, but I don't know how many stories the average reader reads and so that doesn't match 'number of Lit visitors'.

Should be more than 631658. Literotica is 25 years old, 25*365*173= 1578 625 more or less…? Haha! Who knows?

 

[Anton25]

For the record, adding the numbers associated with the categories on the main story page, which is a rounded estimate to the nearest hundred of the total number of stories in those categories, yields an estimate of about 632,500 stories, which seems to track with the search method.

According to this site, Lit has received about 65m visits in the last month with an average of about 9 pages per visit, suggesting about 7 million users, although not all of those will be unique users, and I don't think there's an easy way to break it down between obsessive authors who visit multiple times per day and casual readers who visit once or twice a week. And the last 30 days are not necessarily representative of any long-term trends, of course. Final caveat, I have no way of knowing how accurate their estimated numbers are, so don't assume they're gospel.

Fascinating!

 

[Bamagan]

Should be more than 631658. Literotica is 25 years old, 25*365*173= 1578 625 more or less…? Haha! Who knows?

That assumes that the rate of new stories was consistent across 25 years, which is not a good assumption to make, since the site did not spring full-grown out of Laurel's head. The 1400ish stories posted in the last week (from the New Stories page, and therefore about 200 per day on average) is not representative of what was happening here in, say, 2004, when the site was young and innocent.
Edit: Also, we have no data on how many stories have been removed, either by the site for violating the terms of service, or by authors who no longer wish to publish here. But there are at least thousands of those, and perhaps tens of thousands.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Should be more than 631658. Literotica is 25 years old, 25*365*173= 1578 625 more or less…? Haha! Who knows?

One cannot assume that lit has had such consistently high traffic right from opening day back in 1998. People were still on dialups then and people got jobs by reading the newspaper help wanted and then walking into a business and filling out an application.

Traffic would have been far far lower in the first five or even maybe ten years than it is today. Although I would guess that it's been pretty consistent over the past ten or so.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Should be more than 631658. Literotica is 25 years old, 25*365*173= 1578 625 more or less…? Haha! Who knows?

You can't reverse engineer from 2024 submission rates.

The total story count of 632 500 and counting is your starting point, but the new story rate won't be linear from day one. I know for sure that there was a trend up of stories during Covid, but whether that's continued over the last year, I don't know.

 

[ronde]

One cannot assume that lit has had such consistently high traffic right from opening day back in 1998. People were still on dialups then and people got jobs by reading the newspaper help wanted and then walking into a business and filling out an application.

Traffic would have been far far lower in the first five or even maybe ten years than it is today. Although I would guess that it's been pretty consistent over the past ten or so.

Having published stories on Literotica since 2001, I can verify that what you say is correct. Fewer stories were published every day back then. It seemed to me that there was more traffic on the forums (then bulletin board) and the chat room than on the story side of the site.

On the few times, I've checked, Literotica publishes between 150 and 200 new stories a day and that probably varies for several reasons. Winter is a time when most writers don't have a lot of outside activities to do, while summers are pretty full of things other than writing erotic stories. Fall and Spring are sort of an average of Winter and Summer. It also depends upon if a contest is in operation, as it seems as if contest entries get moved ahead of other stories as far as time for approval.

I would assume readership follows the same trends though there is no real way to track how many readers are on the site at any given time. The number of "hits' on any site is just the number of IP addresses that entered the site and doesn't really reflect why or what they did once they entered. The "reader" could have read a hundred stories, spent an hour in the chat room, read through all the form posts, or looked at any other part of the site..

 

[Anton25]

1. Does anyone know the number of stories in Literotica?

2. …..the average number of new stories, which are added everyday?

3. ……the number of readers in L as of now?

Having published stories on Literotica since 2001, I can verify that what you say is correct. Fewer stories were published every day back then. It seemed to me that there was more traffic on the forums (then bulletin board) and the chat room than on the story side of the site.

On the few times, I've checked, Literotica publishes between 150 and 200 new stories a day and that probably varies for several reasons. Winter is a time when most writers don't have a lot of outside activities to do, while summers are pretty full of things other than writing erotic stories. Fall and Spring are sort of an average of Winter and Summer. It also depends upon if a contest is in operation, as it seems as if contest entries get moved ahead of other stories as far as time for approval.

I would assume readership follows the same trends though there is no real way to track how many readers are on the site at any given time. The number of "hits' on any site is just the number of IP addresses that entered the site and doesn't really reflect why or what they did once they entered. The "reader" could have read a hundred stories, spent an hour in the chat room, read through all the form posts, or looked at any other part of the site..

Thanks a lot! Am fascinated by stats. Wonder how many writers read ..?

 

[Anton25]

Thanks a lot! Am fascinated by stats. Wonder how many writers read ..?

I have a new story out now … it has the grand total of two !!!

 

[Anton25]

And "what is the meaning of life?" and "how does one attain inner peace?" yadayadayada, blahblahblah.

The answer of course is 42.

Although one could go to the new list and count back the stories until today's date changes into yesterday's. That would answer the second question at least. As far as the others, really don't know if it's possible to know, but there are some stat freak geeks around who might have some insight. Ask 8letters perhaps.

Of c the meaning of life is 42!
But that wasn’t my question
Thanks. Getting some good answers here.

 

[mildlyaroused]

Actually if you add together a search for 'the' 631240 with a search for '-the' 2723 you get 633,963 stories in total.

If you search " " (just a single space), there are also 633,963 results.

The first ever story, sorted by date, was published in 1996 by Manu: "[TEST] Please Approve This Story". It has a 3.57 star rating.

So the total number of stories (not including deleted ones) does indeed seem to be 633,963.

 

[StillStunned]

So the total number of stories (not including deleted ones) does indeed seem to be 633,963.

Alright class, there's your homework for the weekend. There will be a test on Monday.

 

[mildlyaroused]

The first non-admin story was published on 9/12/1999. That was 8,937 days ago. 633963 / 8937 = 70.94.

So 70.94 stories on average since inception. Doesn't account for deletions though

(i edited because i forgot Lit displays dates the American way haha)

 

[lilshymynx]

1. Does anyone know the number of stories in Literotica?

2. …..the average number of new stories, which are added everyday?

3. ……the number of readers in L as of now?

While I can't speak to the number of stories actually approved, Laurel did mention in a conversation I had with her recently that they get 200+ submissions a day. So there's at the very least a starting point.

 

[Anton25]

While I can't speak to the number of stories actually approved, Laurel did mention in a conversation I had with her recently that they get 200+ submissions a day. So there's at the very least a starting point.

Wow