Here's an interesting exercise: look at your FF.Net stats and identify how many readers you lose on the first chapter of your story.

The One He Feared

Chapter 1 views (Legacy Story Stats): 85,458
Chapter 2 views (Legacy Story Stats): 37,191

Chapter 1 Visitors, June 2020 (Story stats): 849
Chapter 2 Visitors, June 2020 (Story stats): 378

So by the legacy stats TOHF has a retention ratio of 44%. By the Story Stats page its retention ratio is 45%.

Victoria Potter

Chapter 1 views (Legacy Story Stats): 92,578
Chapter 2 views (Legacy Story Stats): 19,599

Chapter 1 Visitors, June 2020 (Story stats): 2,950
Chapter 2 Visitors, June 2020 (Story stats): 680

So by the legacy stats VP has a retention ratio of 21%. By the Story Stats page its retention ratio is 23%.

Conclusions

I'm not too surprised by the results. VP has a much slower start than TOHF and takes time to diverge substantially from canon. If you're flicking through fanfic and just reading opening paragraphs to see what fics grab you, VP isn't going to do a very good job of that. It's targeted more at readers who like the tropes the fic advertises, and have settled down for a long read.

Still, 20% is pretty bad. Makes me consider adding some sort of prologue to grab attention, or a rewrite of the early chapters to add more attention-grabbing AU elements from the start. But that sort of rewrite is dangerous for forward momentum/progress. I'll consider it when I finish second year.

The other interesting thing here is the uniformity of the figures between the legacy stats page (which shows cumulative hits since publication) and the new story stats page (which shows unique hits by month).

Finally, it's interesting to note that despite its awful retention ratio, in absolute terms VP is still getting more readers making it to chapter 2 on a monthly basis. There's no substitute for actively updating.

 

What's long term retention like?

The only long story I'm working on with plenty of published chapters right now has 2,137 views for chapter 1, 701 views for chapter 2, and 161 views for chapter 10. This seems pretty bad to me, but I don't have much to compare it to.

 

Long term retention is difficult to measure. I think the legacy user stats page is useless for it because there's a lot of weird inconsistencies in it. For example, chapter 24 has almost double the views of chapter 23.

So I think you have to use the month-by-month visitor stats contained in the new Story Stats pages. But that's also less than ideal because of its monthly nature - the month in which a particular chapter was published will contain a lot more hits for that specific chapter.

Even if I pick a month where I didn't update the fic, there's still a lot of difficulty: the most recent chapters have higher counts than the chapters preceding them, showing that people are still reading the latest update, and there are plenty of points where visitors goes down then up again.

With all that said, for July 2020, the VP figures were as follows:

Chapter 1: 1,903
Chapter 2: 395
Chapter 23: 218

(I am excluding chapter 24, which had 977 visitors.)

So to put that in percentage terms, chapter 2 retains 20% of chapter 1 readers (in line with my OP), and around 55% of readers who make it to chapter 2 continue all the way to the end.

 

Let's see. On my most popular story I have:

Chapter 1 - 38,692
Chapter 2 - 13,981
Chapter 3 - 8,957
Chapter 4 -10,803

So 36%.

 

Something to keep in mind. Some people don't use the alert system for whatever reason, (i know the ones I have are crappy) so they bookmark your story somewhere along the line and check on it later for updates.

The only way I could see this working is by being very consistent about updating and then do your figures from there, so long term would actually be a better way to judge. Letting them know up front that you'll be updating once a week, month, whatever, would make it work moreso.

 

For my only multi-chapter story (Draco Malfoy meets a Dark Lord):

Legacy:
- chapter 1: 5,268 visitors
- chapter 2: 2,283 visitors

So 43%, but the 2nd chapter was uploaded a year after the 1st one, so that's something to consider.

For the month of July:
- chapter 1: 657 visitors
- chapter 2: 388 visitors

So 59% in that month, other months seem to be similar.

 

One question is, does it count you twice if you visit a chapter twice?

Like, whenever you click on a fanfic link, it will take you to chapter 1. This could really screw up results if it's not looking at unique users. Even then, if you are on your phone, then computer, than laptop, all can give a sense of lower retention.

 

This is why I pay more attention to total hits than visitors. It's just not clear how they're counting visitors, and and I don't think FFN is putting resources into ensuring their stats are accurate.

Plus, I've read elsewhere (and I don't know how true it is) that search engines can 'ping' the first chapter of a fic somehow and generate a hit. If that's the case, first chapter numbers won't be accurate at all.

 

I had been wondering this for a while. Didn't even know about the Legacy Page.

Old Blood

Chapter 1 views (Legacy): 27,723
Chapter 2 views (Legacy): 7,452
Chapter 14 views (Legacy): 4,568
Chapter 15 views (Legacy): 1,540

By this, Old Blood has a retention of roughly 27% readers to the second chapter, but only 16% as of the 14th (before I took a year-long break). And a depressing 5% after the break.

Chapter 1 views July 2020: 1,761
Chapter 2 views July 2020: 540
Chapter 14 views July 2020: 481

For the update in July (Ch 15), 30% of the readers continued on to read the second chapter. This ratio might be misleading though since probably some of the old readers might have clicked on the story title before advancing to the newest chapter through the dropdown. 89% of what imagine are new readers read it to the end.

While I agree that an active update schedule is good for the final retention rate, I really have no clues to raising the retention rate from the first chapters to the second. Readers are fickle and sometimes just want to read something that appeals personally to them. I imagine the ratio for the people who pick up a book from the shelf to those who actually buy it is much, much worse.

 

A Portage to the Unknown (my published SW/HP cross, not my good one). Story in a fandom with an extremely low bar, also incomplete with 6 chapters.
Chapter 1 views = 34,593
Chapter 2 views = 17,337
Chapter 6 views = 22,791

Bonfires at Midnight (7 chapters, "complete")
Chapter 1 views = 39,021
Chapter 2 views = 17,688
Chapter 7 views = 20,776
Chapter 6 views (lowest) = 11,407

Harbinger of Blood. vampire!Harry story with a popular pairing, incomplete, 11 chapters.
Chapter 1 = 62,500
Chapter 2 = 29,698
Chapter 11 = 26,756
Chapter 9 (lowest) = 15,401

Euphoria (my best fic). Complete, popular pairing, shitty summary, 23 chapter
Chapter 1 = 104,120
Chapter 2 = 37,793
Chapter 23 = 25,137
Chapter 21 (lowest) = 15,031

Harry Potter and the Unexpected Changes. My most viewed fic (2.2m). Popular pairing, complete, also terrible.
Chapter 1 = 368,355
Chapter 2 = 202,552
Chapter 16 = 101,469
Chapter 14 (lowest)= 78,604

I've got a fair amount of stories posted, and all my multichapter stories are over 100k views which perhaps makes me a bit of an outlier. But there is an obvious pattern here. The chapter before the penultimate chapter is almost always the lowest view count. And these were just the first 5 stories I picked, because I thought they would show a good spread. Upon further investigation, I only had one other story that didn't follow this, where the low point was the 4th to last chapter instead of the 3rd. It was also mostly true that a lot of the final chapters have a surge, and that's likely due to people reading the first chapter, and then reading the last to see if it gets any good. Same thing whether the story is completed or not. The final chapter is always more viewed then the previous few, but not necessarily more viewed than chapters 2,3, or even 4 (as in the case with Euphoria). With Unexpected Changes, the final chapter is actually the 9th most viewed chapter, kinda weird. I guess the story is just so bad that not nearly as many people cared to see what the ending was.

 

I feel like the pageviews on the first chapter have more to do with the people who click on the story and click out without reading it than the people who read the first chapter and don't read the following ones.

 

It's pretty hard to make anything much out of the stats FFN provides. Much though I have tried.

There's a lot of things gumming it up, and not many ways to control for them (that I've been able to think of, anyway). First chapter retention is something I'd definitely love to be able to work out, but just taking the plain numbers doesn't seem to be all that informative.

the numbers that follow are legacy views, with last month's per-chapter visitors in brackets.

Consider my oldest story (incomplete): Harry Potter and the Sun Queen.
Chapter 1: 59,098 (378)
Chapter 2: 26,710 (183)
Chapter 6: 19,215 (113)
Chapter 7: 23,120 (155)

So, over the lifetime of the story, nearly 4000 people more have read the final chapter than the penultimate chapter. That's a 20% increase, which I struggle to explain. My guess is that those are a mix of old readers coming in to check if there's been an update, and new readers who skipped to the end to check if the story was actually complete (despite being labelled 'in progress').

Its first chapter retention is, supposedly, 45%, and is probably buoyed up by the fact that the story doesn't see all that much 'footfall'. It's rare that it gets linked. That said, there's still apparently a group of people who don't tend to follow, and instead simply bookmark the story, and check it out every now and then, probably bloating the first and last chapter.

If I look at just last month's stats, I end up with similar proportions (a 48% retention, 38% uptick on final chapter).

So, what about an old complete fic: The Power He Knows Not.
Chapter 1: 211,896 (1,982)
Chapter 2: 109,727 (1,078)
Chapter 10: 50,221 (449)
Chapter 11: 63,720 (674)

A nearly 52% first-chapter retention on whole-life views, and a 54% retention just last month. Hard to say why. Despite the fact that it's complete, however, it still manages a 27% uptick (or 50% in last-month visitors). Why would that be? It's complete. There's really no need to check up on the last chapter. I guess there are still 'bookmarked last chapter' people coming back for a re-read? Or maybe it's people checking the end of the story before they give it a go?

What happens if the story is popular and updating(ish), though: The Shadow of Angmar.
Chapter 1: 538,472 (15,580)
Chapter 2: 137,241 (2,918)
Chapter 29: 26,518 (5,369)
Chapter 30: 28,738 (22,285)

The last chapters' views of this one are pretty meaningless really because of the long hiatus followed by more regular updates.

Really, though, all we can pull from this is that the retention rate is seemingly abysmal (just 25% in views, and a shocking 19% in visitors). The views for the final chapters are out-of-whack because that was the month 30 was posted, and at this point it looks like people are reading chapters as posted rather than sitting and binging the whole thing.

This got me wondering. How does being an actively updating fic impact your 'retention' rate?

I went back to The Power He Knows Not, but wound the clock back to February 2015.
Chapter 1: 27,646 (20,474)
Chapter 2: 10,542 (8,856)

For a retention rate of 38% (43%).

Well, I guess it's official. The Power He Knows Not is my greatest work. I guess I can retire.

 

The unnamed crowd, "hEy PlEaSe CoNtInUe ThE sUn QuEeN"

meanwhile me, yes please.

Also, to counter the asskissing with some possible data, I have one story with 2 chapters. It started as a mind arts based story where Harry would eventually absorb the power of the sun, purity via legilimency from a sort of legacy Voldemort who defiled a runestone carved in the heart of the Chamber of Secrets with the aspect of Sobek, an ancient wizard whose charms protects river fishermen from beasts to this day, god of protection of the teeth of the Nile, carved by Salazar Slytherin after sacrificing the blood of his to-come progeny in order to usurp the powers of rebirth and life from an ancient egyptian wizard named Osiris, creator of the horcrux, who had created and perverted the transfiguration of the soul that the ancient pharaoh Hor-aha learned at the breast of Amun in order to protect his people. Unfortunately, all egyptians could be considered his people. Also I hadn't and haven't the dizziest daydream of how to keep on the story. I literally had two things in my mind when I wrote Cattle of Ra... an early occlumency/legilimency introduction to Harry Potter (after the climax of book 2) and pervasive ancient Egyptian mythology whereby their gods were wizards and/or witches playing with time. And those two things didn't anywhere remotely close to a story make. RIP

Views, legacy

Chapter 1 - 5,603 views
Chapter 2 - 4,046 views

Views, current

Chapter 1 - 16
Chapter 2 - 8

lol

And my goofy ass one-shot that was spawned here from a fanfic fight thread. HK-47 vs Dobby

Chapter 1 - 2661 views


and since the legacy update:

Chapter 1 - 24 views lol

Also, @Anarchy hurry up and finish "A Portage..." or grow a monumental set of balls and try and turn "HP And The Root of All Evil" into the legend it can be.