Is Readership Down?

[LexxRuthless]

I was looking at the 30-Day Toplist for most-read stories just a minute ago. It had seemed like there were less views on most stories within I/T and Anal when I looked at the recent submissions, but when I looked at the 30-Day list it seemed even more stark. There are only two stories there with 100k views. Normally I would expect to see at least six or seven within the last week. The drop-off after that was even more severe -- only 9 stories with 60k views over the last month, 7 more with 50k views. Just that first page with the top 50 most-read stories of the month feel like a slow week on Literotica.

Have you noticed a drop-off in other categories and in your own stories the past few months?

 

[SimonDoom]

I started paying attention to story data in April 2017, almost five years ago. There has been some change since then. In May 2017 the number 250 story on the 12-month most viewed story list had about 115,000 views. Today, the 250th story has about 89,000 views. That is a significant drop, and it is curious.

On the other hand, if you look at the top of the list, there are plenty of stories that have view numbers that seem consistent with what was going on 5 years ago, and there's one, Bucky Duckman's Cum For Austin, that is an extreme outlier, with 850,000 views in the last year. That is extraordinarily high--much higher than what I have seen over the last few years.

The numbers on the 30 day list on average seem a little low compared to what I remember them being before. Your story Mom Sucks Dick has nearly 150,000 views and is number 1, and that's fairly consistent with what I recall from the past, but in the past there would be more stories over 100,000.

 

[LexxRuthless]

I started paying attention to story data in April 2017, almost five years ago. There has been some change since then. In May 2017 the number 250 story on the 12-month most viewed story list had about 115,000 views. Today, the 250th story has about 89,000 views. That is a significant drop, and it is curious.

On the other hand, if you look at the top of the list, there are plenty of stories that have view numbers that seem consistent with what was going on 5 years ago, and there's one, Bucky Duckman's Cum For Austin, that is an extreme outlier, with 850,000 views in the last year. That is extraordinarily high--much higher than what I have seen over the last few years.

The numbers on the 30 day list on average seem a little low compared to what I remember them being before. Your story Mom Sucks Dick has nearly 150,000 views and is number 1, and that's fairly consistent with what I recall from the past, but in the past there would be more stories over 100,000.

That was how it felt to me as well. In addition, because I had those new chapters up over the past two weeks, I was looking at the numbers all of the new I/T stories were getting on the "More Recent Stories" tab in the new beta view. There were an awful lot of those -- perhaps as many as two-thirds -- that had less than 12k views. That just seemed awfully low for the category. It is what got me thinking about it before I started looking at that most-viewed 30-day list.

 

[MelissaBaby]

I started paying attention to story data in April 2017, almost five years ago. There has been some change since then. In May 2017 the number 250 story on the 12-month most viewed story list had about 115,000 views. Today, the 250th story has about 89,000 views. That is a significant drop, and it is curious.

On the other hand, if you look at the top of the list, there are plenty of stories that have view numbers that seem consistent with what was going on 5 years ago, and there's one, Bucky Duckman's Cum For Austin, that is an extreme outlier, with 850,000 views in the last year. That is extraordinarily high--much higher than what I have seen over the last few years.

The numbers on the 30 day list on average seem a little low compared to what I remember them being before. Your story Mom Sucks Dick has nearly 150,000 views and is number 1, and that's fairly consistent with what I recall from the past, but in the past there would be more stories over 100,000.

It could also be that the readership is not smaller, but getting more diverse and reading more in the less popular categories.

 

[MrPixel]

How does this compare to any increase or decrease in the number of new stories published? If there’s a situation of a relatively constant readership reading more stories, then number of views per story is sure to drop.

 

[MelissaBaby]

How does this compare to any increase or decrease in the number of new stories published? If there’s a situation of a relatively constant readership reading more sorties, then number of views per story is sure to drop.

Good point.

Simon, didn't you do an analysis on the number of stories being published a little while ago?

 

[LexxRuthless]

It could also be that the readership is not smaller, but getting more diverse and reading more in the less popular categories.

Quite possible, which is why I threw out the topic in this forum. If you take a look at other categories where you have stories, do you see a noticeable difference? Are those categories experiencing a "bump" in readership?

How does this compare to any increase or decrease in the number of new stories published? If there’s a situation of a relatively constant readership reading more sorties, then number of views per story is sure to drop.

The numbers on that 30-day most-read list have a fair amount of variability, but you could generally expect to see 2-3 of them with around a quarter-million views, and there would be a dozen or so with over 100k views. Silkstockingslover and HeyAll would typically have two of those each. I/T stories usually drive the top end of that list, so maybe that's it -- just more dilution of the category and it's turned a lot of regular readers away from it.

 

[NotWise]

You don't say what period of time you're looking at. A drop over years? months? weeks?

I keep records on the views on my stories and went back to some older stories that get regular views (all in either Romance or I/T) and I don't see any significant drop-off in views over at least the last year.

Judging from my stories, views on new stories seems highly variable. I wouldn't speculate without having a systematic record from the top list that is at least twice as long as whatever period you're thinking of.

 

[LexxRuthless]

You don't say what period of time you're looking at. A drop over years? months? weeks?

I keep records on the views on my stories and went back to some older stories that get regular views (all in either Romance or I/T) and I don't see any significant drop-off in views over at least the last year.

Judging from my stories, views on new stories seems highly variable. I wouldn't speculate without having a systematic record from the top list that is at least twice as long as whatever period you're thinking of.

Yessir. I've really only paid attention to the numbers on those lists since I started posting my own stories and they would occasionally make an appearance there; so less than four years. However, I regularly perused the 30-day and 12-month lists of most-viewed stories for titles I had missed, back when I was merely another anonymous reader on the site, and that began around 2002-2003. I wasn't primarily paying attention to what the number of views was, but that's where the general pattern for "what it should look like" formed in my head.

As others have pointed out in this thread and in others, there were a lot fewer stories and authors back then, so good stories could expect to get a lot more attention. I merely got the impression that there has been a recent drop off in views, and wondered if others had noticed.

Another possibility just occurred to me. There may have been search engines operating on the web that were regularly triggering "views" on stories, and the filtering criteria could have changed so that they aren't automatically triggering thousands of views on every new story. That would not mean a reduction in readership, but it would mean that our "Views" stat may actually become an accurate indicator of how many people are at least opening our stories to give them a look.

 

[RejectReality]

Another possibility just occurred to me. There may have been search engines operating on the web that were regularly triggering "views" on stories, and the filtering criteria could have changed so that they aren't automatically triggering thousands of views on every new story. That would not mean a reduction in readership, but it would mean that our "Views" stat may actually become an accurate indicator of how many people are at least opening our stories to give them a look.

This is what I expect. I wouldn't say accurate though. More accurate certainly, but no matter how many bots and spiders you filter, there are no blacklists or algorithms that will ever catch them all.

 

[windar]

I've had the sense the last few years that readership is down on all the erotica sites I post on. As others have noted that may simply be distributing a relatively saturated readership base over more sites and more stories on each of those sites. I don't have solid data to back this up, though.

 

[SimonDoom]

Another possibility just occurred to me. There may have been search engines operating on the web that were regularly triggering "views" on stories, and the filtering criteria could have changed so that they aren't automatically triggering thousands of views on every new story. That would not mean a reduction in readership, but it would mean that our "Views" stat may actually become an accurate indicator of how many people are at least opening our stories to give them a look.

I don't have the technical expertise to say anything about this definitively, and others here are probably far more competent to weigh in. But I think something along these lines has happened. The fact that the 250th most viewed story on the 12 month list has 25,000 fewer views than 5 years ago is interesting and significant, and it doesn't seem to me that an increase in the number of stories alone would explain it.

In response to Melissa's question, I've never done a "study" along those lines. 8Letters has started several very interesting threads where he did some analysis of numbers, but I don't recall one quite like that. My opinions are based on casual observations rather than on anything I would describe as a "study."

It could also be that the readership is not smaller, but getting more diverse and reading more in the less popular categories.

Maybe, but that's not consistent with the results that are evident at the top of the top 250 most viewed list. Incest appears to have as much of a chokehold on views as ever.

 

[NC_Coastal]

I've never looked at this list before, and Wow! I'm at No. 23.

 

[SamScribble]

Is Readership Down? No. I think Watership's Down, isn't it?