Any Way to Know?

[SkyBubble]

My newest story is doing very well in terms of views, with 2 favorites, a Hot tag, and just 24 hours published. Is there any way to tell how many of those views actually finished the story?

 

[norafares]

No, there isn't. There is no available data for that. Congrats on the success of your new story.

 

[TheLobster]

It's not unreasonable to treat the number of votes as the lower bound; the 80-20 rule would suggest you can multiply it by five to obtain a rough estimate of reads.

 

[ElectricBlue]

It's not unreasonable to treat the number of votes as the lower bound; the 80-20 rule would suggest you can multiply it by five to obtain a rough estimate of reads.

My estimate, based on chaptered stories - where it's reasonable to assume that the Views on the last chapter sorta-kinda reflect those who stayed with the story past the third chapter and read the whole thing - is that maybe one in five Views actually finish. So the same 80/20 principle, coming at it from a different direction

 

[TarnishedPenny]

It's not unreasonable to treat the number of votes as the lower bound; the 80-20 rule would suggest you can multiply it by five to obtain a rough estimate of reads.

Sorry, but I must disagree. I don't regularly compare 'reads' to 'votes', but having done so on occasion, I found the ratio varied wildly between my stories. Much seemed to depend on the story category.

 

[SimonDoom]

I don't think we really have any idea what percentage of views consists of reads. I've tried puzzling it out and keep coming to the same conclusion that it's not knowable. It's somewhere between views and votes, but that's an enormous range.

My view vote ratio for stories ranges from around 200:1 to 40:1, with an average around 90:1.

Ratios diminish for successive chapters in chaptered stories, but not as much as I would guess.

As for the observable view:vote ratio disparity that people observe, it could be the result of:

1) people viewing the story but clicking out of it before reading it, or
2) people viewing it and reading it, but in some cases being less prone to vote on it.

We just don't know.

 

[Lector77]

Whether the 80/20 “rule” applies in this arena is a question to investigate, not assume. Pareto never stated, nor intended, for it to be universally applicable.

Take a very non-literary example, a basketball team’s starting five.
Are the two best scorers, 20%, apt to account for 80% of points scored by that cohort? Not likely for most teams.

How about blocks? Are the two best rim defenders going to get credit for 80+% of blocks? Very likely yes. Ditto assists.

In short, assuming the Pareto Principle is a good predictor of the ratio of reads to votes is unjustified.

 

[EmilyMiller]

In short, assuming the Pareto Principle is a good predictor of the ratio of reads to votes is unjustified.

Humans suck at statistics.

 

[TheLobster]

Whether the 80/20 “rule” applies in this arena is a question to investigate, not assume. Pareto never stated, nor intended, for it to be universally applicable.

Take a very non-literary example, a basketball team’s starting five.
Are the two best scorers, 20%, apt to account for 80% of points scored by that cohort? Not likely for most teams.

How about blocks? Are the two best rim defenders going to get credit for 80+% of blocks? Very likely yes. Ditto assists.

In short, assuming the Pareto Principle is a good predictor of the ratio of reads to votes is unjustified.

Your sporting examples are irrelevant. Pareto principle has been shown to work pretty accurately when applied to online contributions; Wikipedia being probably the most famous instance. The exact ratio doesn't matter too much, mind you, it's the ballpark that's around an order of magnitude that the "rule" is about.

 

[Bazzle]

My newest story is doing very well in terms of views, with 2 favorites, a Hot tag, and just 24 hours published. Is there any way to tell how many of those views actually finished the story?

I think we would be ultimately be very disappointed!

 

[Bamagan]

I assume that about 10% of the views from the first week or so are actual reads, if the story is short enough to be consumed in one sitting, and somewhat lower if it's long enough that it takes them two or more sessions to work through it. The ratio is probably higher for readers who find it 'out of the stacks' via search, since they're presumably looking for something relatively specific.

 

[NuclearFairy]

Sorry, but I must disagree. I don't regularly compare 'reads' to 'votes', but having done so on occasion, I found the ratio varied wildly between my stories. Much seemed to depend on the story category.

And between length of story. I've got a 6k story in the non-erotic category view to vote ratio is 20/1. Then I've got a 34k story in the scify/fantasy category, view to vote ratio is 200/1. That second one, at least half of those votes were from followers. So it also depends on how many followers you have.

 

[PennyThompson]

It's not unreasonable to treat the number of votes as the lower bound; the 80-20 rule would suggest you can multiply it by five to obtain a rough estimate of reads.

My estimate, based on chaptered stories - where it's reasonable to assume that the Views on the last chapter sorta-kinda reflect those who stayed with the story past the third chapter and read the whole thing - is that maybe one in five Views actually finish. So the same 80/20 principle, coming at it from a different direction

This is an interesting idea...

My Accessibility Compliance has 10,107 views, and 178 votes.

10,107/5 and 178*5 would give a bounding box of 890 to 2,021 theoretical completed reads. Which doesn't sound like an entirely nonsensical set or numbers, tbh!

The same formula gives a range of 1,115 to 1,630 to Dandelion Greene I, which is more narrow but also within the boundaries of Accessibility...

I don't know enough about stats to say if this is reasonable or not, though

 

[TheLobster]

I don't know enough about stats to say if this is reasonable or not, though

It does seem to pass the eyeball test Additionally, the ratio of the (supposed) full reads to views is slightly higher for the 5k-ish story (AC) than the 8k-ish one (DG1), which is expected assuming fewer people complete reading the longer story.

This saying, the factor of 5 may as well be 3 or 7 or 9 in reality, and is probably dependent on confounders like the category the story is in. But in any case, I think it's still more useful to think of how many people read the story but didn't vote, instead of trying to figure out what small proportion of the fickle number of views (which are easily inflated by bots, accidental clicks, or deliberate clicks to check the word count (still not displayed anywhere but the story page...)) corresponds to full reads.

 

[SkyBubble]

Congrats on the success of your new story.

Thank you. Unfortunately, the other one I submitted for Pink Orchid got rejected.

 

[SkyBubble]

Sorry, but I must disagree. I don't regularly compare 'reads' to 'votes', but having done so on occasion, I found the ratio varied wildly between my stories. Much seemed to depend on the story category.

What's been your experience with E&V?

 

[SkyBubble]

I assume that about 10% of the views from the first week or so are actual reads, if the story is short enough to be consumed in one sitting, and somewhat lower if it's long enough that it takes them two or more sessions to work through it. The ratio is probably higher for readers who find it 'out of the stacks' via search, since they're presumably looking for something relatively specific.

6,662 words.

 

[big_cane_sugar]

My newest story is doing very well in terms of views, with 2 favorites, a Hot tag, and just 24 hours published. Is there any way to tell how many of those views actually finished the story?

Is the stroker part at the end?

Kind of j/k, kind of not.

 

[SkyBubble]

If you mean the "sex scene," yes. But there's plenty of arousal before that. Boudoir Awakening

 

[MillieDynamite]

No way to know if they finish or not. Maybe the site owners have some way of monitoring that, but I don't think they do.