Stat Porn Ch. XXX -- Favorites and Votes

[SimonDoom]

The story stats download feature is a great time-waster, but there's a lot of interesting (to me) data buried in the numbers.

For instance, the ratio of voters who "favorite" a story. It's hard to tell how many people actually read a story to the finish, because there's such a huge disparity between views and votes (for me the ratio is about 88:1). All we know is that the number of actual readers lies somewhere between those two numbers.

Anyway, I wanted to know what the ratio is between votes and favorites -- of those who vote on a story how many make it a favorite?

What I found is the range is huge, from a low of .028 (2.8 favorites per 100 votes) to .24 (24 favorites per 100 votes).

Not surprisingly, the low number is for my Loving Wives spoof story, by far my most hated story (3.66 score).

The best is an exhibitionist story. But what's weird is that two of the stories of mine with the best favorite to vote ratio are my two lowest rated of my six exhibitionist stories.

The average numbers for each category of story (favorites/votes), from highest to lowest, are:

Exhibitionist .182
Sci Fi .169
Incest .129
BDSM .128
Erotic Couplings .056
Loving Wives .028

The only meaningful samples here are incest and exhibitionism because I only have one story published in each of the other categories. But the numbers track my gut sense about readers for each category. I sense Exhibitionism is a happy and responsive crowd. Sci Fi, too. Incest is big. It gets a lot of views but stories are less likely to get big score and favorite numbers. And Loving Wives has a lot of grumpy people who read stories they don't like, and therefore don't favorite them.

The other thing I found is that the first chapter of a series has by far the best favorite to vote ratio. That seems counterintuitive, because in the case of both of my series the first chapter has by far the greatest number of views but also by far the lowest score of any chapter in the series.

There's no clear relationship between score and favorites, which also seems counterintuitive to me. I'm trying to figure out what this says about reader preferences and behavior. I don't have a good working theory, so far.

 

[SamScribble]

I am inclined to think that 'favorites' are a mixture of 'this is one of my favorite stories', and 'this is my bookmark'; 'I'll probably read this / finish reading this later'.

 

[SimonDoom]

I am inclined to think that 'favorites' are a mixture of 'this is one of my favorite stories', and 'this is my bookmark'; 'I'll probably read this / finish reading this later'.

I think you are right, although the "bookmark" use probably has diminished since the introduction of the reading list feature. But in either case it's a mark of approbation, because the reader isn't going to mark the story if he/she doesn't like it enough to want to read it later.

 

[HectorBidon]

Interesting figures. My own favorite/vote ratios go up to about 0.14.

I'd say that (leaving bookmarking aside) while readers favorite a story because they really like it, they're as likely to vote when they dislike a story as when they like it. So if a story manages to attract as readers only the audience for which it is intended, it might get a high score and a high favorite/vote ratio, although the overall number of favorites and votes might not be that large. On the other hand, if a story brings in a wider audience, some of the readers might not care for it and it will get a mediocre score, even though it might still get a decent number of favorites. This goes along with your explanation for the difference between the Exhibitionist /Sci-Fi and Incest / LW categories.

As far as chapters, I always have trouble myself figuring out how to favorite chapter stories. I don't want to clutter up my favorites list with too many references to the same story, so I tend to only favorite the first chapter or the one that really convinces me to put the story on my list. But I don't favorite every chapter.

As far as which is more important, score or number of favorites, I guess that the score is directed mostly toward the reader, telling him or her what other readers thought of the story. The number of favorites is directed toward the author, letting him or her know that there were a few people out there at least with whom the story struck a real chord.