Stats Nerd #2 - A Blog

If you missed the first part of this a few months ago, you can catch up here!

I'm a massive math nerd so every so often I like to make graphs from my Ao3 statistics, this weekend I've been working on my latest update! A surprising amount has changed both in positive and negative ways.

On the plus side, much of what I called the "over 1k (kudos) club" last time has now become the "over 3k club" which is just kind of insane to me.

On the negative, it really shows exactly how low my numbers have been so far this year. I assumed people were busy watching the show instead of reading fics, but there hasn't been any kind of upswing since the season ended. People say they're spending all their quarantine time reading fics, but mine have remained pretty low. 

I guess you guys are my only friends now 😭

(Don't worry, I'm not actually depressed about it, it's just confusing and I'm curious about why it's happening and if it's something I can remedy!)

Anyway, let's get on to the fun part: The math!

These are my total numbers and averages that get pumped out by default when I update fic stats (the wonders of spreadsheets, my dudes). I was very surprised to see that my average Kudos is now over 1k!! Mostly because of the over 3k club and Little Sh*t which should really be considered an outlier, but I digress.

Let's start off our graphs with a chronological look at Kudos - the reason I like these is because it shows how non-linear the stats are. You don't just get one good fic and then you're set for life, it's still a massive gamble on whether a fic will do well or not (please note the different scales for each group)

2016 - 2018:

2019:

2020 so far:

So as you can see there were some bigs dips among the spikes in previous years, but so far this year about half my fics have been the same as those major lows previously. The biggest spike this year has been the latest part of my Little Sh*t series, so no surprises there, but I guess the rest have just been too short and fluffy for Ao3 - it's always the E-Rated fics that do well there.

Speaking of which, here's another graph!

For the record I initially did this with "All Fics" and "BNHA Only" but there was basically no discernible difference (I had to re-check all my calculations to make sure it wasn't a mistake) so I deleted one. 

This is pretty consistent with last time - despite (or maybe because?) not having many M fics, they seem to come out on top in the hit count. However, in kudos, the average is pretty consistent. I assume this is because, by definition, the high-ranking fics are balancing out the major lows. My spikes (whether high or low) don't really discriminate between ratings.

Next is one that's a little hard to read, I don't know if Patreon will let you zoom in or not, but if you can't read it let me know and I'll find some other way to link a readable one.

This shows every BNHA fic I've posted on Ao3 (78 of them I believe)

Kudos, sorted by date:

Kudos, sorted by number of kudos:

Hits, by date:

Hits, by number:

Really what I want these to illustrate is, once again, that most of my fics don't get the big numbers that you see on my bigger name ones. I get a surprisingly large number of comments etc telling me that I "don't understand" and "smaller creators have it so much harder" when I've literally been there for years, and still live there for the majority of my fics. I feel incredibly lucky and amazed by the number of people who enjoy my fics, to the point where the numbers on the popular ones don't even feel real. I don't know how anyone looks at a fic with 1000 kudos and thinks "yep that sounds right, a thousand people liked this". It doesn't even compute in my brain.

Not to get depressing in the middle of a math blog, but I get some pretty shitty comments and messages etc from people, to the point where any time I see a number on my Ao3 inbox it kind of gives me a sense of dread, of "here we go again" and preparing myself for the worst. I hoped that maybe showing the actual numbers etc and illustrating that I just post a lot so every so often, one gets noticed. And that's really the advice I give to anyone who wants to grow their audience etc - post more. 

I understand that sometimes you can't, and that's fine! I don't expect everyone to put in as much time as I do, but I don't think people should be able to complain about me having good numbers on 5 of my 95 fics when they've only written 5 total. 

Okay, end of the depressing bit - had some not-fun times on twitter last night and it's got me in not a great mood. People making incorrect assumptions about me and throwing around personal insults etc.

Had to post this to show them who's boss, though. They can go suck a dick.

ANYWAY, MATH.

One of the common things people say is that multi-chap fics get more attention because they're in the recently update list more times etc etc which has some merit to it, yes. So here's a comparison of only my one-chapter fics (hits and kudos). 

You'll notice some spikes in there for each part of the Little Sh*t series (the vast majority of the peaks, in fact) but you'll also see one in there for Hands Off which was a runaway success I still don't fully comprehend - it was actually a commission, too! As were the ones either side of it that are also pretty high spikes. A lot of people tell me their commissioned fics get less attention than others, but mine seem to trend the other direction. The people know what they want to see, I guess.

(I'm working on like 5 more commissions right now, maybe they'll break my 2020 kudos slump).

Last proper set of graphs, probably my favourite kind, is my percentage graphs. These kudos as a percentage of hits, and most fic authors I've talked to have agreed that they land on around 10% for most fics (reminder that clicking on a new chapter link doesn't add to the hit count, you have to go to the first chapter to add a hit, and sometimes it doesn't count rereads - Ao3 hit counter is messy y'all.)

Ordered by number of hits:

Ordered by number of kudos:

These ones always surprise me because they sit in such a narrow range and there really seems to be no correlation with total hits or kudos. Some of the more popular ones get more re-reads which add more hits (sometimes) to change the average, the less popular ones might get looked at but not read/kudos'd, and it all kind of balances out into this weirdly small range of percentages. There's kind of a vague downward trend on each, which is probably from re-reads since the right hand side is the more popular ones, but they almost look like constellations for how random and messy they are.

And finally we come to the last graph, which I have lovingly titled "if you keep reading them I'll keep writing them but I feel like you're not gonna keep reading them"

(To anyone who didn't realise, this is just the little sh*t series)

Alright everyone, time for me to head to bed. Hope you had some fun doing math with me! Enjoy the rest of your weekend! (and to that guy on twitter who thinks posting graphs is "putting pressure on smaller creators", go eat a bag of dicks).