How Many Literotica Authors Are There?

[LexxRuthless]

I'm not sure why, but I thought there were something like 13,000 authors. Recently I was reviewing some older threads in this forum and saw someone had mentioned a number closer to 24,000 -- and that was in 2006!

After reading that, I thought I would try to find out for myself how many authors currently have stories on the site, but I am just woeful at navigating Literotica to find that sort of information. I tried to use the search feature, but that cut off at 10,000 results.

Do any of you know where I can find a current tally of authors on the site? Not a listing of every one, just a total number of published Literotica authors.

 

[jehoram]

Do any of you know where I can find a current tally of authors on the site? Not a listing of every one, just a total number of published Literotica authors.

"Current" is the problem word here, if you mean "active."

The only way I can think of is to get up a list of the authors of each letter of the alphabet, and numbers, and count how many are in each list. But since new authors are added every day, it's kind of a moving target.

 

[SimonDoom]

I am not sure if there is a comprehensive way to do this. The old story search page showed the total number of stories. When I use the Search page and search for all stories I get a number of 474,510.

But there doesn't seem to be a way to get an accurate total for all published authors. You can search for members, but it tops out at 10,000, which is far fewer than the total.

The total number of published authors who have updated their profiles within the last year is 8, 164, which must understate the total, because there are active authors who have not updated their profiles in over a year.

 

[JuanSeiszFitzHall]

I am not sure if there is a comprehensive way to do this. The old story search page showed the total number of stories. When I use the Search page and search for all stories I get a number of 474,510.

But there doesn't seem to be a way to get an accurate total for all published authors. You can search for members, but it tops out at 10,000, which is far fewer than the total.

The total number of published authors who have updated their profiles within the last year is 8, 164, which must understate the total, because there are active authors who have not updated their profiles in over a year.

I've never updated my profile, and see no need to do that.

 

[SimonDoom]

I've never updated my profile, and see no need to do that.

I'm sure there are many active authors who feel the same way. I rarely update mine, although I updated it last December.

 

[Voboy]

Ten writers, plus another 26,990 alts.

 

[TxRad]

Ten writers, plus another 26,990 alts.

No, no, no. That is the number of real posters and alts on the General board.

 

[eroticstoryspinner]

"Current" is the problem word here, if you mean "active."

The only way I can think of is to get up a list of the authors of each letter of the alphabet, and numbers, and count how many are in each list. But since new authors are added every day, it's kind of a moving target.

Indeed. I figure any one who has teh guts to write a story and press "submit" is worthy of being called an author. That said, It seems that the vast majority of authors produce a work or two and are never heard from again. Worse, some people write a lot of really good stories and just seem to drop out of sight. Some of my favorite writers here have been silent for years.

Making a WAG (wild ass guess) I would say that there might be 3-400 active writers who submit with any kind of regularity. And that might be a high estimate.

 

[SimonDoom]

I did a search for authors who had submitted stories and identified as transgender, and it yielded the number 518. My searches for female and male authors yielded the number 10,000, so my guess it's substantially more than that for both.

According to most statistics I've seen, transgender people are less than 1% of the population. If we assume then that the total population of authors is about 100 times that of transgender authors, then we get a figure of about 50,000. My guess is that the number of active authors -- those that have published within the last two years, say -- is much, much less than that, but I don't think there's a way to search for the total efficiently.

 

[Salacious_Scribe]

There's a shitload. Or is it buttload. I forget teh conversion rate.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I did a search for authors who had submitted stories and identified as transgender, and it yielded the number 518. My searches for female and male authors yielded the number 10,000, so my guess it's substantially more than that for both.

According to most statistics I've seen, transgender people are less than 1% of the population. If we assume then that the total population of authors is about 100 times that of transgender authors, then we get a figure of about 50,000. My guess is that the number of active authors -- those that have published within the last two years, say -- is much, much less than that, but I don't think there's a way to search for the total efficiently.

I would expect that many trans authors haven't checked that box in their profile. Many trans women would prefer to just tick the box that says "female", and similarly for trans men. I'm also not convinced that it's safe to assume the demographics of authors here match the general population.

It shouldn't be too difficult to estimate the total number, though.

Every Literotica account has a URL that looks something like https://www.literotica.com/stories/memberpage.php?uid=1234567. Each of us has a different ID number, and it looks as if they're just generated sequentially - the most recent accounts have numbers around 5561000. (Manu is #2, Laurel is #7, if you were wondering.) Some are missing, presumably deleted accounts.

So, what you can do is:

(1) randomly generate a number between 1 and 5561000.
(2) check whether that account exists, and if so, whether it has any stories.
(3) repeat until you have a good enough estimate of what % of those 5561000-odd accounts are author accounts.
(4) multiple that % by 5561000 to estimate the total number of non-deleted author accounts.

There are some tweaks that could be made to improve that (e.g. I'd probably do a systematic sample rather than random) but that's the general idea. Probably easy enough to automate all that.

 

[ElectricBlue]

(1) randomly generate a number between 1 and 5561000.
(2) check whether that account exists, and if so, whether it has any stories.
(3) repeat until you have a good enough estimate of what % of those 5561000-odd accounts are author accounts.
(4) multiple that % by 5561000 to estimate the total number of non-deleted author accounts.

EB looked at Bramble. "Well?" he asked. "What's the answer?"

Suzie grinned. "You just want a race with Simon."

"Yup." He made his way to the finish line and settled down to wait. Suzie went off to find ribbons, although she did think she'd look best on the podium .

 

[SimonDoom]

I would expect that many trans authors haven't checked that box in their profile. Many trans women would prefer to just tick the box that says "female", and similarly for trans men. I'm also not convinced that it's safe to assume the demographics of authors here match the general population.

It shouldn't be too difficult to estimate the total number, though.

Every Literotica account has a URL that looks something like https://www.literotica.com/stories/memberpage.php?uid=1234567. Each of us has a different ID number, and it looks as if they're just generated sequentially - the most recent accounts have numbers around 5561000. (Manu is #2, Laurel is #7, if you were wondering.) Some are missing, presumably deleted accounts.

So, what you can do is:

(1) randomly generate a number between 1 and 5561000.
(2) check whether that account exists, and if so, whether it has any stories.
(3) repeat until you have a good enough estimate of what % of those 5561000-odd accounts are author accounts.
(4) multiple that % by 5561000 to estimate the total number of non-deleted author accounts.

There are some tweaks that could be made to improve that (e.g. I'd probably do a systematic sample rather than random) but that's the general idea. Probably easy enough to automate all that.

Re the transgender/percentage estimate: who knows? You could be right. There are some authors who decline to check male or female, so that could affect the calculation, too. Given that the total number of stories appears to be close to half a million I think 50,000 or so authors seems right to me, but it might be higher. I'll be it's not much lower. But that's total authors over 20 years, not current, active authors.

Your method of calculating total authors makes sense, but I'm too lazy to want to take the time to do that!

 

[lovecraft68]

No, no, no. That is the number of real posters and alts on the General board.

You think there's only 26k alts in the GB?.

But there authors with multiple pen names here, so that would screw up the total number of individual authors

 

[lovecraft68]

I did a search for authors who had submitted stories and identified as transgender, and it yielded the number 518. My searches for female and male authors yielded the number 10,000, so my guess it's substantially more than that for both.

According to most statistics I've seen, transgender people are less than 1% of the population. If we assume then that the total population of authors is about 100 times that of transgender authors, then we get a figure of about 50,000. My guess is that the number of active authors -- those that have published within the last two years, say -- is much, much less than that, but I don't think there's a way to search for the total efficiently.

You can't assume anything here when it comes to gender. Many people don' choose a gender at all. there are men here writing as women and the other way around.

I've never understood why people get consumed with the gender of an author. If a guy needs it to be a female he's either s homphobe who thinks he'd be 'gay' for getting off on something a guy wrote...or they're stuck in the adolescent stage where they can't stop doing the butthead laugh...'she wrote cock...uh huh uh huh."

Initial question was total number of authors, but I guess its too much to keep it general and not wonder who is who.

 

[SimonDoom]

Initial question was total number of authors, but I guess its too much to keep it general and not wonder who is who.

Well, for about the millionth time you are making assumptions about people's motives that have no basis in fact and are dead wrong. You do that all the time, ungenerously, to me and to others, and I don't know what moves you to do that.

I have no interest in that subject. I did it that way to see if, when you further screened the search by gender, you might get a number under 10,000, which is the number you get when you search for authors unscreened by gender. The system won't give you a number over 10,000. I figured if the total for either gender was under 10,000 it would information useful to give a total estimate. When I looked through the search feature I couldn't figure out another way to do this (Bramblethorn, as usual, has come up with a method that's probably better than any other, provided you're willing to take the time to do it).

As it turns out, I did not get a result under 10,000. Both male and female author numbers are at least 10,000, so we can assume that total author numbers (all I was aiming at) are well over 20,000. I used the transgender numbers as another way to estimate a total -- admittedly, a wildly imperfect method, but something.

My recollection is that the previous Member Search page DID have a total member number, but the new one doesn't show that. I don't remember what the old page said.

 

[Bramblethorn]

My recollection is that the previous Member Search page DID have a total member number, but the new one doesn't show that. I don't remember what the old page said.

Yeah, I couldn't find a count of total members, so I ended up looking in the "new authors" view, picking the newest I could see, and looking at their ID number. That suggests about 5.6 million accounts have been created there, but that number includes deleted accounts and many who don't have stories.

Another way to get a quick estimate of authors:

From the main story view you can see how many stories there are in each category. I think it's about 500k total. If you suppose a "typical" author writes about 5 stories, that would imply ~ 100k authors (or about 2% of all Literotica members).

That one hinges on knowing average stories/author, which is tricky to estimate without going back to a sampling strategy. But I'd expect it to be somewhere between 1 and 10, which would imply at least 50k authors.

edit: whoops, I missed your other post, where you came to the same conclusion!

 

[NotWise]

How accurate do you need the number to be? Does it need to be all time, or "active?" And how do you define "active?"

For me it's adequate to say that tens of thousands of authors have published on Lit (we aren't an exclusive group) and probably thousands of authors could be considered currently active.

 

[Salacious_Scribe]

Yeah, I couldn't find a count of total members, so I ended up looking in the "new authors" view, picking the newest I could see, and looking at their ID number. That suggests about 5.6 million accounts have been created there, but that number includes deleted accounts and many who don't have stories.

Another way to get a quick estimate of authors:

From the main story view you can see how many stories there are in each category. I think it's about 500k total. If you suppose a "typical" author writes about 5 stories, that would imply ~ 100k authors (or about 2% of all Literotica members).

That one hinges on knowing average stories/author, which is tricky to estimate without going back to a sampling strategy. But I'd expect it to be somewhere between 1 and 10, which would imply at least 50k authors.

edit: whoops, I missed your other post, where you came to the same conclusion!

If I wanted to figure out the number of authors, with 5.6 million members I would pick 560 random members and see how many are authors. Then multiply the number of authors in my sample by 1,000. Imperfect but that will give you an estimate of authors.

The only way I can see to get currently active authors is too watch the new story lists and count each author over a period of say 1 year. That might give you an estimate but getting anything close to exact would be impossible.

 

[KeithD]

Does someone remain a Literotica author after not posting any stories for three years?

 

[NotWise]

Does someone remain a Literotica author after not posting any stories for three years?

I think you'd need to know the author's intent.

You've seen it before. E.g. "It's been a hard five years, but I'm still here, and I'm still writing."

In lieu of compiling a list of everyone who's ever published on Lit and forcing them to respond to a questionnaire, maybe picking a number is a good alternative.

 

[KeithD]

You've seen it before. E.g. "It's been a hard five years, but I'm still here, and I'm still writing."

That points to someone claiming they write. Does that make someone a Literotica author, though?

 

[_Lynn_]

Does someone remain a Literotica author after not posting any stories for three years?

Like me?

 

[NotWise]

That points to someone claiming they write. Does that make someone a Literotica author, though?

If they've published before and they're still working at it, then yes.

The site could probably count the total number of different authors (or user accounts) who they've published. That number would have some value. If you want to know how many authors are active then that's a lot more nebulous.

 

[TxRad]

Maybe someone should ask Laurel if she has any ideas on the questions.