So I was looking at some ancient history, and I got to thinking.

What do your numbers mean? How do you interpret them? FF.net has a fairly decent suite of tools to track the various numbers associated with your stories, but very little context for what those numbers mean.

Do any numbers tip you off as to an aspect of a story? Can you glean any useful information from the review/favorite/follow ratio? Do any numbers stick out as especially meaningful?

Are there any interesting historical trends having to do with fanficiton statistics?

Have any of the long-time authors here noticed any quirks or unusual or interesting numerical oddities with their own personal fanfiction stats?

Reason I'm asking: General curiosity: admittedly geeky love of numbers and statistics. Personal curiosity: trying to understand significance (if any) of some of my own story's numbers.

 

Pretty much as standard across my stories, I lose about 50% of readers with the first chapter, according to FF.net legacy statistics.

Wastelands, for example:

# of hits to first chapter: 803,617

# of hits to second chapter: 460,312

And from there, it's a slow decline. I average out to about 100,000 views, give or take a few 1000, across every chapter of the story. 31 chapters in total.

A similar trend across my other major stories, too.

 

Interesting. In fact, this is one of the things I recently looked at that really stood out to me. For my own story, depending on what kind of weighted average you use for the later chapters (which haven't really stabilized, hits-wise), I'm losing something like 75% of my readers after Chapter 1.

This is exactly the kind of thing I hope to learn from this thread - is that worryingly high, enough to maybe try to address it? Or is that a fairly standard dropoff?

 

No, it doesn't. First chapter is a prologue detailing Sirius's early escape from Azkaban and the consequences thereof. You might be on to something there.

But, I don't want to constrain this thread to "help Newcomb understand his own story's lack of yeasty numbers."

I'm more interested in what people think numbers mean, if anything, and especially in the historical trends more experienced people have seen over time on FF.net.

 

I'm curious, for the long-time authors, what is you views to follows and views to favorites ratio? How many people who click on your story decide to favorite?

---------- Post automerged at 17:22 ---------- Previous post was at 17:19 ----------

Personally I suspect that would be an easy way to compare the quality of stories without using raw popularity.

 

Don't read that much into it for ongoing stories. If you click on the link in your favorite list, after a story updated, it takes you to the first chapter of that story. Then you usually select the last chapter to jump to. Only if you click on the link in your update notification mail you get directly to the last chapter.

 

I think there are a few interesting numbers to be found but everything is always dependant on the age of the fic in question which makes comparisons between fics hard to draw.

As Starfox says, 1st to 2nd chapter loss is going to happen. And not just because people decide they don't like the story. Old stories will see a gigantic drop (I should think) because they often get clicked on then left when people realise they've already read it.

For ongoing stories (of reasonable length) I think Follows/Favourites is a potentially useful metric. I think of Follows as a statement of 'This could be good' while Favourites are 'This is actually good'. A big disparity probably suggests there's something that folk aren't liking.

But that comparison only works for longer fics that aren't complete. Once complete many people will stop following and if too short many people wont favourite as they're waiting for more information.

It's also worth looking at unique views vs total views. Unique views is only available on a month-to-month basis but it can still be useful. I think looking at unique view falloff per chapter can be an indication of chapter quality (or rather, chapter popularity). One needs to bear in mind that it's only a month-wide snapshot and so many things can make it go strange.

Reviews are hard to use as it's not too difficult to bloat them (Review with an OC and I might add it to the fic! etc etc). Best might be to do a parsing for positive/negative mention but that's some work and likely to show up 'Not enough Ron Bashing' as a bad thing.

But really unless you track the stats across a large sample size and over a long period of time (throughout the 'lifecycle' of a fic) it's hard to make any hard and fast statements.

 

What Starfox said. I believe that oftentimes people click on the story, get to the first chapter, see that they already read the story, then go to the latest chapter or wherever they've stopped reading before.

It's not the best indicator, but sorting after reviews popularity-wise can show you which chapter worked the best. From there you can then try to find what made that chapter better than the others, or at least what made them special enough for many people to comment on them.

In my case those were scenes including character death (well, the death of a dog more likely); scenes that made me go through a variety of emotions even while writing; scenes that brought new concepts, places or ideas into the story; and, of course, the ending, where readers got their emotional payoff.

The above is pretty much self-explanatory in terms of what I got from it:

• Work in conflict (if fitting, even death), and don't be afraid to do unusual things like, say, stabbing dogs
• Feel what you write (sounds cheesy, but I found that one to be really important. There's, in my opinion, no greater feeling than writing something you yourself find amazing and then having it appreciated by others)
• Be more innovative, and even if you use old stuff because the plot demands it, try to give it a new spin
• Write an end and try to make it as good as you can. You'll always write your chapters to the best of your abilities, but for the ending, make it count. That's the most important part of a story. The one readers will, hopefully, remember when they think about the story

Now that I've written that, I see that most of it is stuff I've learned while writing, not through the stats. But they do reflect it, which, I guess, ties in with your original question.

 

As a note, I favorite anything that seems remotely interesting after reading what's there. I don't think I've used the Follow feature even once.

 

Yeah, same with me. It gives you an easy page to bookmark that shows everything (without having to login, ect). It's sortable and shows the latest updates.

That said, over time I've increased my standards for what I mark. I think once it hit 800 stories and I reviewed (and pruned) some early picks that... didn't turn out so good.


1st chapter hits can't really be used to judge quality of a story. Sure there will be people who quit right after it, but often it's used to skip to a middle chapter -you have to click on either the first chapter or the latest. Lots easier just to click the title.

 

Reviews are less useful nowadays than they used to be largely because so many people read fanfiction on smart phones and tablets, on which it's much more of a pain to leave a review.

For what it's worth, I tend to see a much larger dropoff in my multi-chaptered work after the first chapter. Dagger and Rose, e.g., has about 200k hits on chapter one, 50k on chapter two. Factors of three to five seem to be common across all my longer stories. Present tense narrative is a big turnoff for readers.

 

I don't think I've ever used the follow feature ever, so for using that as a measuring stick, i'd say it's a no-go. And I think I've got maybe 20 fics favorited.

View count is a tricky one. Like, I was the last one to post in the thread think in the first post here. One of my stories is at 1.2 million views, but it's a heaping pile of shit. It's because it's my oldest fic, and complete, and Harry/Daphne, all things which help (though I'm sure if it was Harry/Ginny or Harry/Hermione it would have 5 million views. In contrast, my old Harry/Rowena fic is almost as old, twice as long, and has less than half the views). Also, the first chapter in my 1.2m story has 1.9k views this month for the second chapter, 1.1k for the second, and 400 for the last, so that means 1 in 5 people are actually reading the whole story, not a very good ratio I think.

By contrast, my most recent story has 200 views for the first chapter, and 100 views for every subsequent one (a better ratio than my older story, possibly suggesting an increase in quality, hence greater reader retention). I'm not sure why it's got like 10% the views of my older story, but I think it's because the older story has been linked a bunch on other websites over the years, giving it more outside traffic, or more people forgot they have read it 5 years ago and click it again. Also, I do agree that it's not strictly linear as such, as people probably read the first few chapters and had to wait for updates, causing them to be less likely to read the later updates (as well as sometimes having additional views in the earlier chapters to reread them).

I'm not really sure what to use as a success metric. I would say favorites, but the top 25 list sorted by favorites on FFN is by and large mostly terrible fics. Perhaps author alerts - if people actually care enough to put your story on update alert, that must mean the story is okay. I'm definitely not going to say review count, because the shittier the story is, the shittier the reviews, both in people actually posting that's it's shit, but also shitposts just saying "great chapter, moar!" and shit like that.

 

With new fandoms or when I am bored I tend to use the favourite count, in my experience is a much better measuring stick than reviews and follows.

 

As others have said, this is a dicey proposition. I feel like people use follow/favorite for a variety of reasons, only some of which fall within the accepted definitions of those words. So, it's hard to glean meaning from those numbers when a "favorite" can mean anything from "this is literally one of my favorite stories" to "this looks interesting, maybe I'll come back to it at some point."

I can get on board to a point, but I have to say, I do care whether people like it or not. Although I guess that's a simplistic way of putting it. There are a few different levels of "like," and I care about them to varying degrees:

- Is the story entertaining?
- Does it execute the concept that it promises with the setup/summary?
- Is the writing good enough to not get in the way of the story?
- Do readers care about the characters and what happens to them?

Ultimately, while I do enjoy writing for its own sake, it would lose some of the magic for me if no one ever read it. The act of compression that you get with writing - spending an hour on something that it takes a minute to read, all that work setting up the perfect series of sentences to convey an idea, a scene, an expression, a feeling - is part of its charm. And that doesn't happen in a vacuum, it's an action between the writer and the reader. The writer coils the spring, meticulously. The reader lets it spring forth in their mind, majestically.

And while gross popularity isn't the best way to measure reader engagement / impact, I wonder how other people approach this issue.

 

That depends on how you define quality. It's very easy to dismiss what one does not like as shit. Harry Potter has touched and entranced millions of readers - despite having a shitty plot and a shitty characterization and a world building that fails logic and mathematics. Compared to say Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter comes out as shit if you use the standards of this forum.

And yet I like it far more than Lord of the Rings.

I'd say this: If your readers are entertained and like it, you are doing well. Brightening their days certainly is not a bad measuring stick.