2013 Year-End Numbers and Open Thread
We did this last year to see how the year shaped out in terms of readership, especially in terms of readership -- we here on the back end of things have access to statistics like these, but they're not immediately visible to anyone else. So here's to visibility!
This is what 2013 looks like in terms of page views on LiveJournal. (In fact, all of these numbers are LJ-only, and don't factor in Tumblr, AO3 reposts, or our mirror site.) As you can see, that's a lot of people reading. In fact, it's even more people than is immediately apparent; you can see that January had 39,936 total page views from 4888 unique visitors, but December actually had 39,152 total page views from 6354 unique visitors.
It's especially interesting to compare these annual numbers with 2012 as a whole: 2013's best-read months weren't as good as 2012's, but all of its months were comparatively high and stable in terms of readership. 2012's least-visited month was May, where there were 19,865 total page views from 576 unique visitors; compare that to 2013's least-visited month, April, where there were 31,199 total page views from 3675 unique visitors.
January was 2013's month with the most individual pageviews, even though no issue came out that month; these numbers, therefore, probably reflect a lot of the catch-up efforts of people who didn't get to the previous December's issue right when it came out.
The Hookers and Blackjack issue shares first place this year for the issue with the most submissions -- fourteen stories and a standalone illustration. You can see the spike around when the issue came out, of course, but I'm also charmed by the secondary spike around the 14th. There are far worse ways to spend Valentine's Day than with happy-ending gay porn tales.
Tea for Two is our eighth f/f special issue, and it's the co-largest issue, with thirteen stories and two standalone illustrations. The actual issue release date was toward the end of the month, but there was a great deal of interest near the beginning of it, so I tried to make the graph reflect both high points.
Our Playing Doctor issue was comparatively small and marked the least-visited month in 2013. However...
May is our second month of the year in which no issues are released (we only have three of those now!), yet overall readership rose slightly instead of dropping off. My completely unscientific assumption would be that there's some sort of a Finals Effect involved there, where all of our college-aged readers have to finish their papers and study for exams before they can kick back with some well-deserved smut.
June's readership trickled off a bit at first, but was back with a vengeance near the end for the Heroes and Villains issue. June, in fact, was the third most-visited month, after January and December.
July was our very first Yes, And Special, and you can see that small issue's release got fewer separate hits but more unique visitors than showed up during the spike earlier in the month.
On Writing, one of our reader-suggested themes, turned out to be one of the year's two smallest regular issues -- eight stories, all of which were single-entry length. The month started out low, but the hits around the issue's release brought up the average.
September brought back our artist special issue for the third time with Distant Shores, with one standalone image and six whole comics, ranging from the short and sweet to the quite lengthy.
Masquerade, another reader-suggested theme, was the other of our smallest issues in terms of submissions. Reader numbers don't drop off, though, but instead begin to ramp up again. This is another case where the release-date numbers weren't the highest overall for the month, so I tried to reflect that again with the image here.
Good ol' November, our third and final month of the year with no issue released. No lie, that's a pretty steady stream of readers for nothing new.
And December, traditional home of our year-end Theme-Free Issue, nearly met January in terms of page views and surpassed it easily in terms of unique viewers. Such a nice way to close out the year!
The life cycle of individual stories remains the same as ever -- comments are rare to nonexistant after the first month or so of a story's release, but people are still reading! As I said last year: As an author, I know that it can get incredibly discouraging to put all your effort into a story, polish it until it shines, toss it out into the ether ... and hear little or even nothing back. That's part of why I wanted to make the second part of this post: people are definitely reading, even if that's sometimes obvious from the back end and all but invisible from the front end.
For a bit of follow-up from last year, here's how Sliced (beeblebabe's story from 2012's February issue) has held up through the nearly two full years after its initial release:
So even though people aren't commenting, the numbers show that they are still reading. If you're a contributor and you're interested in how your own submissions have fared, stats-wise, email me and I'll be glad to share.
One of the things we're trying to do to increase contributors' senses of appreciation is the 'like' function on our mirror site -- down at the bottom of every entry, there's a little green heart you can click to express your enjoyment. What's more, there's a widget that keeps track of all those clicks and generates a Top Twenty Stories by Vote page, which we hope will be a good point of entry for people new to the project. While the backup process is not fully complete, it's over three-quarters done already, so you can go give a little love to all but the oldest stories (and those will be available soon!). We'll see about exporting that functionality to LJ, but we can't promise anything just yet.
So here's this year's distillation, repeated from last year as applicable:
Even when they're not leaving comments, people are reading, and even the small issues have a lot of eyes on them. Contributors, please don't be discouraged: your hard work has not gone unnoticed!
Spreading the word continues to be absolutely vital to keeping this project going. Retweets, reblogs, and recommendations elsewhere are all much appreciated, because they're what get attention and lead to more views, especially now that LiveJournal is well into its twilight years as a social media platform. If you like something on SSBB, there's two people you should tell: the creator and a friend.
And speaking of LiveJournal, as splendid as our shiny wonder mirror site is, the number of views there doesn't even approach the number of views on LJ -- so despite how most of the buzz tends to be generated elsewhere, it generally leads back to our traditional stomping grounds. As we said earlier, we intend to stay with LJ as long as we can, in no small part because people are still reading old stories where they originally appeared.
Special issues generally aren't as popular as our regular issues, but that's no surprise, and we still love them, so unless interest completely dries up, they're not going anywhere.
Even as the number of people reading issues is growing, the number of people contributing to issues is shrinking. Spreading the word is great for getting readers, but it's also how we get contributors. If you've been thinking about participating but don't feel you have the experience, know that you're in good company -- this year's issues featured a number of familiar artists and authors alike, but also included several great works from more than a few brave first-timers. We editors are fun and friendly, and we're long-practiced at giving good, gentle constructive feedback. And as the wise philosopher Jake the Dog once said, sucking at something is the first step to becoming sorta good at something.
And finally, consider this an open thread: if you've got questions, comments, suggestions, wishes, or anything else you want to get off your chest, please leave a comment here and we of the editorial staff will do our best to respond!
This is what 2013 looks like in terms of page views on LiveJournal. (In fact, all of these numbers are LJ-only, and don't factor in Tumblr, AO3 reposts, or our mirror site.) As you can see, that's a lot of people reading. In fact, it's even more people than is immediately apparent; you can see that January had 39,936 total page views from 4888 unique visitors, but December actually had 39,152 total page views from 6354 unique visitors.
It's especially interesting to compare these annual numbers with 2012 as a whole: 2013's best-read months weren't as good as 2012's, but all of its months were comparatively high and stable in terms of readership. 2012's least-visited month was May, where there were 19,865 total page views from 576 unique visitors; compare that to 2013's least-visited month, April, where there were 31,199 total page views from 3675 unique visitors.
January was 2013's month with the most individual pageviews, even though no issue came out that month; these numbers, therefore, probably reflect a lot of the catch-up efforts of people who didn't get to the previous December's issue right when it came out.
The Hookers and Blackjack issue shares first place this year for the issue with the most submissions -- fourteen stories and a standalone illustration. You can see the spike around when the issue came out, of course, but I'm also charmed by the secondary spike around the 14th. There are far worse ways to spend Valentine's Day than with happy-ending gay porn tales.
Tea for Two is our eighth f/f special issue, and it's the co-largest issue, with thirteen stories and two standalone illustrations. The actual issue release date was toward the end of the month, but there was a great deal of interest near the beginning of it, so I tried to make the graph reflect both high points.
Our Playing Doctor issue was comparatively small and marked the least-visited month in 2013. However...
May is our second month of the year in which no issues are released (we only have three of those now!), yet overall readership rose slightly instead of dropping off. My completely unscientific assumption would be that there's some sort of a Finals Effect involved there, where all of our college-aged readers have to finish their papers and study for exams before they can kick back with some well-deserved smut.
June's readership trickled off a bit at first, but was back with a vengeance near the end for the Heroes and Villains issue. June, in fact, was the third most-visited month, after January and December.
July was our very first Yes, And Special, and you can see that small issue's release got fewer separate hits but more unique visitors than showed up during the spike earlier in the month.
On Writing, one of our reader-suggested themes, turned out to be one of the year's two smallest regular issues -- eight stories, all of which were single-entry length. The month started out low, but the hits around the issue's release brought up the average.
September brought back our artist special issue for the third time with Distant Shores, with one standalone image and six whole comics, ranging from the short and sweet to the quite lengthy.
Masquerade, another reader-suggested theme, was the other of our smallest issues in terms of submissions. Reader numbers don't drop off, though, but instead begin to ramp up again. This is another case where the release-date numbers weren't the highest overall for the month, so I tried to reflect that again with the image here.
Good ol' November, our third and final month of the year with no issue released. No lie, that's a pretty steady stream of readers for nothing new.
And December, traditional home of our year-end Theme-Free Issue, nearly met January in terms of page views and surpassed it easily in terms of unique viewers. Such a nice way to close out the year!
The life cycle of individual stories remains the same as ever -- comments are rare to nonexistant after the first month or so of a story's release, but people are still reading! As I said last year: As an author, I know that it can get incredibly discouraging to put all your effort into a story, polish it until it shines, toss it out into the ether ... and hear little or even nothing back. That's part of why I wanted to make the second part of this post: people are definitely reading, even if that's sometimes obvious from the back end and all but invisible from the front end.
For a bit of follow-up from last year, here's how Sliced (beeblebabe's story from 2012's February issue) has held up through the nearly two full years after its initial release:
So even though people aren't commenting, the numbers show that they are still reading. If you're a contributor and you're interested in how your own submissions have fared, stats-wise, email me and I'll be glad to share.
One of the things we're trying to do to increase contributors' senses of appreciation is the 'like' function on our mirror site -- down at the bottom of every entry, there's a little green heart you can click to express your enjoyment. What's more, there's a widget that keeps track of all those clicks and generates a Top Twenty Stories by Vote page, which we hope will be a good point of entry for people new to the project. While the backup process is not fully complete, it's over three-quarters done already, so you can go give a little love to all but the oldest stories (and those will be available soon!). We'll see about exporting that functionality to LJ, but we can't promise anything just yet.
So here's this year's distillation, repeated from last year as applicable:
Even when they're not leaving comments, people are reading, and even the small issues have a lot of eyes on them. Contributors, please don't be discouraged: your hard work has not gone unnoticed!
Spreading the word continues to be absolutely vital to keeping this project going. Retweets, reblogs, and recommendations elsewhere are all much appreciated, because they're what get attention and lead to more views, especially now that LiveJournal is well into its twilight years as a social media platform. If you like something on SSBB, there's two people you should tell: the creator and a friend.
And speaking of LiveJournal, as splendid as our shiny wonder mirror site is, the number of views there doesn't even approach the number of views on LJ -- so despite how most of the buzz tends to be generated elsewhere, it generally leads back to our traditional stomping grounds. As we said earlier, we intend to stay with LJ as long as we can, in no small part because people are still reading old stories where they originally appeared.
Special issues generally aren't as popular as our regular issues, but that's no surprise, and we still love them, so unless interest completely dries up, they're not going anywhere.
Even as the number of people reading issues is growing, the number of people contributing to issues is shrinking. Spreading the word is great for getting readers, but it's also how we get contributors. If you've been thinking about participating but don't feel you have the experience, know that you're in good company -- this year's issues featured a number of familiar artists and authors alike, but also included several great works from more than a few brave first-timers. We editors are fun and friendly, and we're long-practiced at giving good, gentle constructive feedback. And as the wise philosopher Jake the Dog once said, sucking at something is the first step to becoming sorta good at something.
And finally, consider this an open thread: if you've got questions, comments, suggestions, wishes, or anything else you want to get off your chest, please leave a comment here and we of the editorial staff will do our best to respond!