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Using my 750 word stories as a proxy for the popularity of Lit categories

EmilyMiller

EmilyMiller

Wanted to have fun
Joined
Aug 13, 2022
Posts
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I have twenty-one 750 word stories published. It struck me that they would form a reasonable data set for assessing the popularity of categories. They are all by me, they are all (d’oh!) the same length. They were all written within three weeks, so it’s not like my writing ability changed much. So I thought I’d share the view numbers. I’ve not included the stories themselves as it was just the categories I was interested in.

One was written before the event, so I excluded it. I intentionally wrote two in Toys & Masturbation. I unintentionally wrote two in Lesbian Sex as my Interracial story was moved to it. In both cases, the stories were quite close to each other in views and I just picked the more popular one. So that ends up with 18 stories and 18 categories.

How well does this line up with your perspectives?


Category - View count
Anal - 14,395
Mature - 11,672
Gay Male - 9,690
Lesbian Sex. - 7,209
BDSM - 6,091
Transsexuals & Crossdressers - 5,714
Exhibitionist & Voyeur - 5,169
Mind Control - 4,494
Toys & Masturbation - 4,369
Erotic Horror - 3,386
Romance - 3,030
NonHuman - 2,742
Celebrities - 2,170
Erotic Couplings - 2,113
Sci-Fi & Fantasy - 2,010
Humor & Satire - 1,686
Non-Erotic - 1,665
Reviews & Essays - 905
 
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EmilyMiller said:
I have twenty-one 750 word stories published. It struck me that they would form a reasonable data set for assessing the popularity of categories. They are all by me, they are all (d’oh!) the same length. They were all written within three weeks, so it’s not like my writing ability changed much. So I thought I’d share the view numbers. I’ve not included the stories themselves as it was just the categories I was interested in.

One was written before the event, so I excluded it. I intentionally wrote two in Toys & Masturbation. I unintentionally wrote two in Lesbian Sex as my Interracial story was moved to it. In both cases, the stories were quite close to each other in views and I just picked the more popular one. So that ends up with 18 stories and 18 categories.

How well does this line up with your perspectives?


Category - View count
Anal - 14,395
Mature - 11,672
Gay Male - 9,690
Lesbian Sex. - 7,209
BDSM - 6,091
Transsexuals & Crossdressers - 5,714
Exhibitionist & Voyeur - 5,169
Mind Control - 4,494
Toys & Masturbation - 4,369
Erotic Horror - 3,386
Romance - 3,030
NonHuman - 2,742
Celebrities - 2,170
Erotic Couplings - 2,113
Sci-Fi & Fantasy - 2,010
Humor & Satire - 1,686
Non-Erotic - 1,665
Reviews & Essays - 905
Click to expand...
Wow, that's amazing! You must have some imagination to be able to write about all those different subjects.
 
Nice spread of data, Emily, and thanks for putting it together (as well as all the stories). I’m not sure of how representative it is overall but in comparing Mature and Romance, I’m a little surprised Romance didn’t have about half to two-thirds of the views of the Mature story, which has been my general observation. It may be that romance category readers expect deeper stories that are typically longer so they weren’t drawn to a 750-word story. Then again, Mature readers often seem to like the longer more developed story too.
 
SouthernCrossfire said:
Nice spread of data, Emily, and thanks for putting it together (as well as all the stories). I’m not sure of how representative it is overall but in comparing Mature and Romance, I’m a little surprised Romance didn’t have about half to two-thirds of the views of the Mature story, which has been my general observation. It may be that romance category readers expect deeper stories that are typically longer so they weren’t drawn to a 750-word story. Then again, Mature readers often seem to like the longer more developed story too.
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Thank you 😊

There were factors like which day they were published on. Saturday can be slow for example. Also where on the new page the story premiered / how many other stories published in the category that day.

It’s not meant to be definitive, just mildly indicative.

Emily
 
So what I have done is to try to create some sort of hits to submissions ratio - an eyeball quotient as it were. I took Emily's hits for each category and divided them by the total number of stories in the category as per lit's category page. This would show how much competition a story would get for the eyeballs in a given category. The more stories submitted assumes more competition for the eyeballs there, and certainly means less time on the recent 25 lists which are big for exposure.

In short, for maximum exposure a story ideally wants the most amount of eyeballs with the least amount of competition.

Now obviously there are (big) questions as to the accuracy of Emily's sample to represent the populations, and of course her stories were posted 1 day apart so one of them has been around 17 extra days than another to collect a few more hits, etc. But the results are certainly interesting. I think that that anal score is likely one heck of an anomaly but who knows?

Other than anal, our best scoring category is Toys, followed by Reviews and Mature, and our worst is EC followed by Sci-Fi.

EmilyMiller said:
Anal - 14,395 / 6,900 = 2.09
Mature - 11,672 / 17,400 = 0.67
Gay Male - 9,690 / 32,300 = 0.30
Lesbian Sex. - 7,209 / 23,000 = 0.31
BDSM - 6,091 / 47,400 = 0.13
Transsexuals & Crossdressers - 5,714 / 20,700 = 0.28
Exhibitionist & Voyeur - 5,169 / 30,600 = 0.17
Mind Control - 4,494 / 12,100 = 0.37
Toys & Masturbation - 4,369 / 4,900 = 0.89
Erotic Horror - 3,386 / 5,100 = 0.66
Romance - 3,030 / 23,600 = 0.13
NonHuman - 2,742 / 15,300 = 0.18
Celebrities - 2,170 / 16,500 = 0.13
Erotic Couplings - 2,113 / 75,000 = 0.03
Sci-Fi & Fantasy - 2,010 / 29,700 = 0.07
Humor & Satire - 1,686 / 3,500 = 0.48
Non-Erotic - 1,665 / 5,300 = 0.31
Reviews & Essays - 905 / 1,300 = 0.70
Click to expand...

Again, not exactly scientific but certainly interesting nonetheless.
 
pink_silk_glove said:
I took Emily's hits for each category and divided them by the total number of stories in the category as per lit's category page. This would show how much competition a story would get for the eyeballs in a given category. The more stories submitted assumes more competition for the eyeballs there, and certainly means less time on the recent 25 lists which are big for exposure.
Click to expand...
The primary issue with this is that a story isn't competing against the entirety of a category, it's competing against the group of stories that share the the same new stories list for that category, and for the new stories list for all categories combined. So there's a group of stories 13 days deep (6 days before going live, day of live, and 6 days after, and it's changing each day). After that, it's similar stories, various searches, and browsing through the category.

By the time they drop off the new list, most stories have received the majority of activity its ever going to get, barring a competition win or event listing.
 
pink_silk_glove said:
not exactly scientific but certainly interesting nonetheless.
Click to expand...
Let's get nerdy:
1710732912761.png
Anal is clearly an outlier, both in views and ratio. Not sure what to make of that. As in real estate, the median seems to be a better measure than mean of the 750-word market.


1710732954076.png

Note that tiny, lonely dot in the lower right corner. That's EC, the slush pile. If you want a high ratio, stick to the big circles, T&M, EH, RE, H&S, and NE. And Anal.
 
@EmilyMiller, I'd say that lines up surprisingly accurately with my assessment and experience, and with the general relative popularity of those categories. If you had a 750 word incest story in that list it probably would be on top.
 
VallesMarineris said:
Let's get nerdy:

Anal is clearly an outlier, both in views and ratio. Not sure what to make of that. As in real estate, the median seems to be a better measure than mean of the 750-word market.




Note that tiny, lonely dot in the lower right corner. That's EC, the slush pile. If you want a high ratio, stick to the big circles, T&M, EH, RE, H&S, and NE. And Anal.
Click to expand...
There are people in this forum that have way more time o their hands than I do. But i appreciate it soooooo much. Thanks. ;)
 
pink_silk_glove said:
In short, for maximum exposure a story ideally wants the most amount of eyeballs with the least amount of competition.
Click to expand...

The ideal category for this is Illustrated. The stories get high views, but there are relatively few of them, so they remain on the new story lists much, much longer than other stories and get even more attention as a result.
 
SimonDoom said:
The ideal category for this is Illustrated. The stories get high views, but there are relatively few of them, so they remain on the new story lists much, much longer than other stories and get even more attention as a result.
Click to expand...

I was going to say, too bad Emily didn't write in incest or LW, the two biggest and most popular categories. Those would be good bench marks.
 
Um, I can offer up an example of why you shouldn't try to cram 17 categories into a single 750 word story... 🤪
 
SimonDoom said:
@EmilyMiller, I'd say that lines up surprisingly accurately with my assessment and experience, and with the general relative popularity of those categories. If you had a 750 word incest story in that list it probably would be on top.
Click to expand...
Yeah - and Loving Wives in second place, no doubt.

Emily
 
pink_silk_glove said:
I was going to say, too bad Emily didn't write in incest or LW, the two biggest and most popular categories. Those would be good bench marks.
Click to expand...
I’m not sure that would have revealed too much we didn’t know already. I’ve written in both, but neither is my natural milieu. I find one kinda boring and distant from my own experience and the other kinda icky (guess which way round).

Emily
 
EmilyMiller said:
I’m not sure that would have revealed too much we didn’t know already. I’ve written in both, but neither is my natural milieu. I find one kinda boring and distant from my own experience and the other kinda icky (guess which way round).

Emily
Click to expand...

No no, I'm not saying that you should have, and I'm certainly not complaining that you didn't. I just remarked how interesting it would have been if we could have compared all of these categories to I/T and LW - a benchmark might have told us quite a bit more.
 
pink_silk_glove said:
No no, I'm not saying that you should have, and I'm certainly not complaining that you didn't. I just remarked how interesting it would have been if we could have compared all of these categories to I/T and LW - a benchmark might have told us quite a bit more.
Click to expand...
TBH, I did consider hitting all the accessible categories (obviously Novels and Novellas was out). But I didn’t feel motivated by either of I/T or LW. Not saying there is anything wrong with those categories, just #notmykink

Emily
 
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