Bramblethorn
Sleep-deprived
- Joined
- Feb 16, 2012
- Posts
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I started keeping stats a while back on views/votes/etc for my story posts. Since some people like crunchy detail on this sort of thing, I thought I'd post some numbers. The attached graph shows total view counts for chapters 9 through 14 of my "Stringed Instrument" series, which were posted about a month apart in the Lesbian Sex category.
Some observations:
- New chapters get a flood of views in the first week (when they're on the "New Stories" list), about 4k-10k views. A lot of the variation seems to come down to how prominently they show up in New Stories - IIRC, Chapter 10 was lucky enough to sit at the top of page 1 for a good 24 hours or so, Chapter 11 was shunted down to page 2 by a flood of contest entries as soon as it was posted. (Also, in hindsight, "Phoebe's grandmother goes into hospital for surgery" may not be the most enticing of my chapter summaries...)
- After that, stories continue to accumulate about 10-40 views per day with no sign of tapering off. It's possible that some of these are bot hits, but they also continue to accumulate votes at a fairly steady rate.
- When a new chapter goes up, previous chapters also get a small but noticeable bump. I'd guess this is mostly new readers who've decided to go back and read from the start.
- Ratings have a big effect on views. When Chapter 12 went up, Chapter 9 (darker blue) picked up some extra votes that shifted it into the top-25 list for the genre around day 111. It dropped out again around day 140. You can see a very clear effect on view counts: it had about 70 views/day while it was in the top 25, about 15 views/day immediately before and after. Later on it made it back into the top-25, as did chapters 13 and 14; you can see the upticks near the right-hand edge of the graph.
Chapter 11 rates a bit lower than the others; combined with the unsexy plot summary I'd guess that's why it picks up fewer readers over time, and has fallen below some of the later chapters.
I expect the numbers would look very different in other categories, and for single-part stories, but some of the general trends might be similar.
Some observations:
- New chapters get a flood of views in the first week (when they're on the "New Stories" list), about 4k-10k views. A lot of the variation seems to come down to how prominently they show up in New Stories - IIRC, Chapter 10 was lucky enough to sit at the top of page 1 for a good 24 hours or so, Chapter 11 was shunted down to page 2 by a flood of contest entries as soon as it was posted. (Also, in hindsight, "Phoebe's grandmother goes into hospital for surgery" may not be the most enticing of my chapter summaries...)
- After that, stories continue to accumulate about 10-40 views per day with no sign of tapering off. It's possible that some of these are bot hits, but they also continue to accumulate votes at a fairly steady rate.
- When a new chapter goes up, previous chapters also get a small but noticeable bump. I'd guess this is mostly new readers who've decided to go back and read from the start.
- Ratings have a big effect on views. When Chapter 12 went up, Chapter 9 (darker blue) picked up some extra votes that shifted it into the top-25 list for the genre around day 111. It dropped out again around day 140. You can see a very clear effect on view counts: it had about 70 views/day while it was in the top 25, about 15 views/day immediately before and after. Later on it made it back into the top-25, as did chapters 13 and 14; you can see the upticks near the right-hand edge of the graph.
Chapter 11 rates a bit lower than the others; combined with the unsexy plot summary I'd guess that's why it picks up fewer readers over time, and has fallen below some of the later chapters.
I expect the numbers would look very different in other categories, and for single-part stories, but some of the general trends might be similar.
