AO3 stats memeage
It's that time of year that people are posting their yearly AO3 stats. I'm ten days late for my own yearly post; things aren't too different at the top, but there's some intriguing stuff happening a bit farther down, so after a quick update I want to talk about a surprisingly popular outlier.
Last year's top stories are pretty much the same. By hits, "Twelve" (Harry/Snape PWP) has passed "A Strange Wild Kingdom" (T-rated Ronan/Adam Raven Cycle story), as I commented then was likely; it was 85 hits behind last April, and now it's 78 hits ahead. By kudos and bookmarks, all five top stories are still in the same relative positions.
But! I have been tracking comments since January 2018, and kudos since July 2019 (posts can be found through my 'statistics' tag, though there are other things, like this post, on that tag). I didn't make a post for first quarter 2019 kudos, because I decided that the stats I was pulling out of my kudos counts were probably only of interest to me, but I did notice something startling as I was adding my kudos from my email to my spreadsheet.
I wrote "Knives Set Aside", a short G-rated Jaqen H'ghar/Arya Stark future fic for A Song of Ice and Fire, for the Chocolate Box exchange that revealed late in the day of February 14th (10 pm by my timezone). My February 16th kudos email (which I receive around 4 am) had 6 signed and 8 guest kudos for that story, which is a record for me for kudos received on one day for a single story (in the time I've been keeping track). And it kept getting kudos, which disproportionately were guest kudos; for the rest of the month I received 4-8 guest kudos almost every day on this story, and occasionally a signed kudos. By the end of the month (a total of 14 kudos emails) this story had 92 kudos! When I did an AO3 statistics meme last August my average kudos per work was 51, and my median only 21. Most of my relatively-popular exchange stories get 30-50 kudos during and shortly after the exchanges. So 92 is a huge number of kudos for me to get on a single story in two weeks.
A few other things stuck out to me. First, that's a big number (for me), but I don't normally write in megafandoms. On the other hand, my other ASOIAF stories are all over the map, kudos-wise[*] - though none of those stories got that many kudos that quickly. And then, of those 92 kudos, only 18 were signed. Which confused me, but I figured that maybe it had been recced in a place where most readers don't have AO3 accounts.
Also, the kudos-to-hits ratio seemed outrageously high to me, in the 25% range (that is, one kudos for every four hits). This is the kind of ratio I usually see for stories in obscure fandoms with very small numbers overall! (In fact in last year's stats post I mentioned that my highest ratio story, at 24.5%, was "Neil deGrasse Tyson Space Station, SpaceshipAdvisor Reviews (Excerpt)" which is a TripAdvisor pastiche under the Original Work "fandom", and had 34 kudos and 139 hits.) I don't track hits as a matter of course, but as the (nearly all guest) kudos kept coming, I noticed that my hit counts seemed relatively low, so I recorded my hits and kudos most days through March and the first part of April. Here's a graph:
Up to the point where I lost interest :-) the kudos/hits make a pretty good straight line. The last point is from this morning, which is a little lower on the kudos/hits ratio but still is 21.2 - by comparison, "Neil deGrasse Tyson" is down to 18.3. And still, most are guest kudos; as of today, 176 guest kudos out of 204 total.
[*] At the time I wrote "Knives", my most-kudosed ASOIAF story was "an apple, cleft in two", which is gen Faceless!Arya & Sansa-as-Alayne, which actually has a similar kudos/hits ratio, 20.6%. So maybe this is not quite as unusual as it seems. I wasn't tracking kudos when I posted it (for Trick or Treat 2014), and maybe it got a similar early flood - certainly it's just getting a trickle now. But most of these kudos are signed (it has 107 guest kudos out of 172 total), and it has more comments and many more bookmarks than "Knives" does.
At the end of March, six weeks after posting, "Knives Set Aside" had 173 kudos and was my 18th most kudosed work (out of more than 270!). The stream of kudos has slowed significantly, but now, at the end of April, it has 204 and is my 15th most kudosed work. Of the stories ahead of it, the most recent one was written in January 2015, so it's kind of amazing to me that it's leaped ahead in the rankings so quickly. It will be interesting (to me, at least!) to see where it ranks next year. (I don't know, maybe after S8 of Game of Thrones nobody will care to read old fic written for the books...)
(By the way, please do not spoil me for S8 of Game of Thrones - due to our move we don't currently have a TV - we're having a built-in cabinet custom made - so I don't expect to be able to watch it (or anything else, for that matter) until sometime next month.)
Crossposted from isis at Dreamwidth where there are
comments. | Comment at Dreamwidth
Last year's top stories are pretty much the same. By hits, "Twelve" (Harry/Snape PWP) has passed "A Strange Wild Kingdom" (T-rated Ronan/Adam Raven Cycle story), as I commented then was likely; it was 85 hits behind last April, and now it's 78 hits ahead. By kudos and bookmarks, all five top stories are still in the same relative positions.
But! I have been tracking comments since January 2018, and kudos since July 2019 (posts can be found through my 'statistics' tag, though there are other things, like this post, on that tag). I didn't make a post for first quarter 2019 kudos, because I decided that the stats I was pulling out of my kudos counts were probably only of interest to me, but I did notice something startling as I was adding my kudos from my email to my spreadsheet.
I wrote "Knives Set Aside", a short G-rated Jaqen H'ghar/Arya Stark future fic for A Song of Ice and Fire, for the Chocolate Box exchange that revealed late in the day of February 14th (10 pm by my timezone). My February 16th kudos email (which I receive around 4 am) had 6 signed and 8 guest kudos for that story, which is a record for me for kudos received on one day for a single story (in the time I've been keeping track). And it kept getting kudos, which disproportionately were guest kudos; for the rest of the month I received 4-8 guest kudos almost every day on this story, and occasionally a signed kudos. By the end of the month (a total of 14 kudos emails) this story had 92 kudos! When I did an AO3 statistics meme last August my average kudos per work was 51, and my median only 21. Most of my relatively-popular exchange stories get 30-50 kudos during and shortly after the exchanges. So 92 is a huge number of kudos for me to get on a single story in two weeks.
A few other things stuck out to me. First, that's a big number (for me), but I don't normally write in megafandoms. On the other hand, my other ASOIAF stories are all over the map, kudos-wise[*] - though none of those stories got that many kudos that quickly. And then, of those 92 kudos, only 18 were signed. Which confused me, but I figured that maybe it had been recced in a place where most readers don't have AO3 accounts.
Also, the kudos-to-hits ratio seemed outrageously high to me, in the 25% range (that is, one kudos for every four hits). This is the kind of ratio I usually see for stories in obscure fandoms with very small numbers overall! (In fact in last year's stats post I mentioned that my highest ratio story, at 24.5%, was "Neil deGrasse Tyson Space Station, SpaceshipAdvisor Reviews (Excerpt)" which is a TripAdvisor pastiche under the Original Work "fandom", and had 34 kudos and 139 hits.) I don't track hits as a matter of course, but as the (nearly all guest) kudos kept coming, I noticed that my hit counts seemed relatively low, so I recorded my hits and kudos most days through March and the first part of April. Here's a graph:
Up to the point where I lost interest :-) the kudos/hits make a pretty good straight line. The last point is from this morning, which is a little lower on the kudos/hits ratio but still is 21.2 - by comparison, "Neil deGrasse Tyson" is down to 18.3. And still, most are guest kudos; as of today, 176 guest kudos out of 204 total.
[*] At the time I wrote "Knives", my most-kudosed ASOIAF story was "an apple, cleft in two", which is gen Faceless!Arya & Sansa-as-Alayne, which actually has a similar kudos/hits ratio, 20.6%. So maybe this is not quite as unusual as it seems. I wasn't tracking kudos when I posted it (for Trick or Treat 2014), and maybe it got a similar early flood - certainly it's just getting a trickle now. But most of these kudos are signed (it has 107 guest kudos out of 172 total), and it has more comments and many more bookmarks than "Knives" does.
At the end of March, six weeks after posting, "Knives Set Aside" had 173 kudos and was my 18th most kudosed work (out of more than 270!). The stream of kudos has slowed significantly, but now, at the end of April, it has 204 and is my 15th most kudosed work. Of the stories ahead of it, the most recent one was written in January 2015, so it's kind of amazing to me that it's leaped ahead in the rankings so quickly. It will be interesting (to me, at least!) to see where it ranks next year. (I don't know, maybe after S8 of Game of Thrones nobody will care to read old fic written for the books...)
(By the way, please do not spoil me for S8 of Game of Thrones - due to our move we don't currently have a TV - we're having a built-in cabinet custom made - so I don't expect to be able to watch it (or anything else, for that matter) until sometime next month.)
Crossposted from isis at Dreamwidth where there are
comments. | Comment at Dreamwidth