Hm.

[serai1]

.
How interesting.

I just popped over to AO3 to look at my stats, and found something interesting: among all the chapters of High Contrast that I've posted, the last one I put up - Erik - has gotten the highest number of page views...by at least double. It's up to 74, but the highest any of the others has gotten has been around 30

Comments

[claudia603]

What creates hits on Archive is always funny to me! Of course, I do find that in general, the most crazy, AU, mpreg, smutty fics iwth kinks galore will naturally get the most hits. But after that, it's very odd. My fic with the highest hits right now is a Bilbo/Thorin very mild rather vanilla slash piece. Makes sense with lbilover's theory because The Hobbit is way hotter a fandom than LOTR is right now and that's a popular pairing. However after that, my LOTR fics with kinks or non-con with traditionally unpopular pairings come a close second! Like my second highest hits thing was a kink fest thing I started for a friend that involves non-con, mpreg, butt plugs, an unpopular pairing, etc. One of my most popular fics on Archive is a gentle, non-graphic mpreg. So mpreg is very popular on Archive, it seems. Probably if a person wrote a steamy, smutty mpreg with non-con and slavery and butt plugs in a very hot fandom with the most popular pairing, it would probably have an enormous amount of hits! :))

I do disagree with you guys on kudos, though. While I abhor facebook and everything to do with it, I do like getting notifications almost every day about kudos on various fics. It really makes my morning! I do think that some of those same people would be too lazy to leave actual feedback and thus I would never hear from them. Although I personally try hard to leave feedback if I read a fic, I don't mind if others don't for me. I'd rather get a kudos than have complete silence and not know whether anyone is reading. But again, that's just a personal thing. I TOTALLY get and respect why one would not like the kudos thing!

[serai1]

But the archive has unique hit counts, so we already know how many people are reading. The kudos serve no purpose other than to take away the impetus to actually say something. For me, I'd rather they didn't exist. I can see how many people are reading; getting lazy kudos is less helpful than getting only comments, because those kudos are of no use to me as a writer. All they tell me is "I can't be bothered to leave a few words". I don't think it's helpful to writers to encourage that kind of attitude, frankly.