That AO3 Meme

[thisbluespirit]

The AO3 statistics meme is doing the rounds again, and it has, it turns out been a year since the last, so, here goes. (I made this post a few days ago, but I don't think any fic has dramatically changed its status in that time.)

Last year's results (though I only did hits that time). Also, don't laugh at me; I mainly write in really obscure fandoms. (That's my excuse.) Anyway, fic navel-gazing follows, because why not?


Hits:
I have a bit of thing about judging these by hits - what does it actually mean? It got linked somewhere, or people keep clicking on it by mistake and go away, disappointed? (Of the three, Kudos seems to me the most reliable method of judging what's popular - although that works for me, because I didn't start posting to AO3 until the kudos button had been put in place. Also I haven't written any pr0n).

1. Truth and Compromise (Discworld, William de Worde/Sacharissa Cripslock, 4404 words; NYR 2011 story. Also recced on het_reccers.) 837 hits
2. Ten Times the Doctor (Almost) Got Hitched (DW, multi-era, 5358 words; recced on crack_van.) 699 hits
3. Observation (Miss Marple/Harry Potter crossover, Luna & Miss Marple, 357 words; clearly was recced somewhere, although I've never yet found out where) 575 hits
4. Seeking Dragons (Tough Guide - DWJ, OCs, 2059; Yuletide 2010 treat.) 429 hits
5. Five Times the Doctor Got in the Way of Captain Janeway (and One Time They Got Along Just Fine) (ST:Voyager/DW crossover, multi-era, 5261 words) 399 hits
6. Compendium (B7, Avon/Servalan, 4849 words, Yuletide 2011) 398 hits
7. Maybe Monday, Maybe Someday (AtS/BtVS, Faith/Wesley, 3772 words. For ShipSwap 2012). 302 hits
8. It's Me or the Muffin (WW, Sam/Ainsley, 1413 words). 297 hits
9. Of Elements and Existence (S&S/Discworld, Various, For Yuletide 2012). 295 hits.
10. The Usual Insanity (WW/The Mummy, Sam, Evie, Various. Recced on a librarian fest comm, I think). 288 hits

It's very similar to last year - the first six stories are still the same (5 and 6 have swapped over, but there's only 1 hit's difference between them), but then, other than The Usual Insanity, the rest are different. The interesting thing (for me, anyway) is It's Me or the Muffin suddenly working its way up there - it's one of the earliest things I posted on AO3 (along with The Usual Insanity). I wonder if the rec for The Usual Insanity had people looking at this, as my only other WW fic.



Kudos:
Which, as I said, I think really shows the actual most popular in terms of people liking them rather than just landing on them and then fleeing for their lives at what they found and not requiring the effort of comments:

1. Observation (39 kudos)
2. Of Elements and Existence (33 kudos)
3. Truth and Compromise (27 kudos)
4. Seeking Dragons (22 kudos)
5. Five Times the Doctor Got in the Way of Captain Janeway (20 kudos)
6. Vigil (Measure for Measure, Duke/Isabella, 1246 words For Yuletide 2012) (19 kudos)
7. Ten Times the Doctor (18 kudos)
8. New Tricks for Old Dogs (or Five Alternate Universes Where Sandra Pullman Was Always Awesome (New Tricks, Team, 2744 words, for Yuletide 2012). 17 kudos
9. End of the World (Again) (New Tricks, Team, 441 words) 14 kudos
10. Compendium (13 kudos)

As I said, this does seem to be the stories people actually like and, on the whole, I'd probably agree. It's very pleasing that three of my last Yuletide's fics are up there already, above the previous. (The only fic that becomes an anomaly, looking at overall results with kudos, is Hit and Run, written for the first Yuletide where Kudos was an option - and there was a tendency to comment instead, whereas it's move to both or either/or since then.) The two Discworld ones are popular - among Yuletide fandoms, Discworld does seem to be generally. I think I'm most happy that people liked Vigil that much, because it was such an odd little piece with a rather strange pairing (although that part was Shakespeare's fault, not mine), so, yes. Plus, there's a definite appreciation on AO3 for people writing New Tricks - I've another one lurking below the top ten somewhere, too.



Comments:
Which is interesting, not so much relating to my fics and their popularity, or lack of it, but it shows just how much fests and exchanges, Yuletide especially, generate far more actual comments and interaction than anything else - in my case, anyway! \o/ for Yuletide! (Since I reply to all comments, the results should be halved, really - or more so where there's been an actual conversation.)

1. Of Elements and Existence (23 comments)
2. Seeking Dragons (22 comments)
3. Compendium (16 comments)
4. Vigil (16 comments)
5. Hit and Run (B7, Jenna, Blake, Avon, 4533 words; Yuletide 2010) 16 comments
6. New Tricks for Old Dogs
7. In Darkness (S&S, Silver, 4868 words, for Yuletide 2012) 15 comments
8. Observation (14 comments)
9. Truth and Compromise (14 comments)
10. Confessions (DW, Eleven, Rory, 786 words, for fandom_stocking 2012) 14 comments

The only one of these that isn't Yuletide or another exchange, is Observation, which, as I've said, is my most popular fic overall, because the world needed Miss Marple and Luna?? 11. is Trick of the Light from last year's remix, too. Basically, I'd rarely ever get any comments on anything were it not for such things.


Last year, I had a look at my least popular fics, too, so here they are again, but that was harder this year - sorted by hits, discounting anything very recent, anything backdated and anything with kudos: What you See In Me (DW, drabble, Thea Ransome from Image of the Fendahl), Cops and Robbers (DW, pre-series, Barbara, First Doctor, slight crossover with Carry On Constable), and A Foolish Family Secret (First Doctor, drabble, crossover with Clive King's The Twenty-Two Letters). I don't think I can complain about any of those.

So, basically, recs and Yuletide help. It would probably help if I wasn't so wilfully obscure, but I am wilfully obscure, there's no use pretending I'm not. Or I can still delude myself I'm not terrible that way, of course.

Comments

[purplecat]

I think the most meaningful measure you could get off A03 would be kudos per hit (because otherwise you will expect stories with a lot of hits to get the most kudos just because they've been seen by more eyes), the problem is that you can't quickly extract that value, at least not if you have a lot of stories. I keep thinking I should attempt to write something that would screen scrape the archive and then generate the relevant data but... no time.

[thisbluespirit]

Yes, true. I did once have one story that had 2 hits, 1 kudos and 1 comment (from apparently different people), so that was 100% positive reaction, but, er, not exactly popular! (It has about 40 hits now, but not proportionally more comments and kudos. :lol:)

eve11's been playing with some of the Teaspoon data - hopefully when she's done she'll post it somewhere for us all to look at.

[john_amend_all]

I've had a go at writing the scraper; if you want a hastily-written chunk of C that depends on another program to do the actual downloading, feel free.

If I sort my results by (kudos ÷ hits), a lot of recently-posted works jump to the top — because it's the first few reader(s) who tend to leave the kudos. On my dataset, I found it worth filtering out anything with fewer than 20 hits to try and counteract this effect.

[purplecat]

Ooh! Downloaded! I will take a peek at it.

[purplecat]

Ooh! Works a treat! I just wrote a little perl script to do the sorting and it's giving a very different picture from looking at either hits or kudos - fascinating!

[john_amend_all]

I happened to revisit this conversation and thought: "You know what would be neat? Parsing the publication date, so you can sort by hits per day." So I updated the analyser to do that, too. Obviously the publication date isn't foolproof; it may have been manually entered, and for a chaptered work it's the date of the most recent chapter. But I thought I might as well do it as not.

[john_amend_all]

If you want to feel better about your stats, I've done mine for comparison :-)

[thisbluespirit]

I know! I've just been replying. :-) And as I said, if you want to feel better about yours, look at my actual least popular fics! :lol: If we write in obscure fandoms, as Pitry once said, it's like a public service and we have to be happy with the satisfaction of having written stuff. And we do get the fun of being the first to put fandoms on AO3.

Besides, most of my hits comes specifically from recs and Yuletide. Yuletide is the best thing for getting hits etc. when it comes to writing in obscure fandoms. Your S&S fics and mine are pretty solidly comparative - except for the Yuletide fics.

[swordznsorcery.livejournal.com]

Obscure?! A story that crosses over the First Doctor with "Carry On Constable" is not obscure, it is a simply wonderful idea. Don't sell yourself short.

Also, don't worry how your hits compare to others. Some people just seem to be at the centre of things. It doesn't make their stories any better than yours (quite frankly, I'm horrified by how bad some popular fic is); it just seems to mean that they're better known, for whatever reason.

I assume kudos is something that people leave if they don't want to post a comment? If so, that seems to be a lot of kudoses, or kudi. Kudes? Anyway, well done. People clearly like what they're reading, even if the number of readers isn't the highest. This sort of thing does make me smile, though. I put all my stuff up on my website, but I never tell anybody about it. As far as I know, the only hits it gets are when I do site maintenance. :D

[thisbluespirit]

Thank you! I am just aware that there are other people who have around 8000 hits for their fics and hundreds of kudoses left. (Yeah, I don't know what the plural should be, either.) Which is neither here nor there, but sometimes I do wistfully wonder what it might feel like to write a short bit of slash in a megafandom and get all that attention. But since I'm not in any megafandoms and I can't write pr0n of any flavour, it's pointless.

And it does give me an excuse for why I'm not read. I am just obscure! It's all fine... :-)

And, :lol:, putting things on the internet and then hiding them does kind of defeat the purpose, unless it's just to keep your hard drive tidy, I suppose.

[john_amend_all]

According to Wiktionary, 'kudos' is a mass noun and inherently uncountable — which obviously leads to some tension when AO3 sticks it right beside a numeric field. But compare 'weight' -- if I gained two stone, I'd have put on a lot of weight, not a lot of weights :-)

[swordznsorcery.livejournal.com]

That's a good example. Thinking up plurals is fun, though. ;)

Technically, a Greek word ending in os should be pluralised to oi (always supposing that pluralised is an actual word). Not sure about kudoi, though. I think I prefer kudes.

That's a great icon, though. I feel honour bound to do as it says.

[john_amend_all]

Wiktionary also has people assuming 'kudos' is the plural, and back-forming 'kudo' as the singular. To which I can only say: Baaaaaah!

[persiflage-1.livejournal.com]

I get narky when I can't leave a kudos on every chapter of a lengthy, wonderfully IC, wonderfully written fic.

I WISH AO3 WOULD FIX THAT!

I tend to comment on fics as much as leave Kudos.

[thisbluespirit]

Yes, I try and comment when I can, too, although kudos is very handy for ficlets and things, or if I've no brain for anything more.

[persiflage-1.livejournal.com]

I sometimes tell authors that I'd Kudos the chapter if I could...

[lolmac]

Wahh! Not all these stories have links to them!

[thisbluespirit]

They do! It's just that, unsurprisingly, they're mostly the same stories in each list, so they only have a link the first time. I can't see one I've missed, but if you're missing one, let me know and I'll fix it.

;-)

[lolmac]

Oh, I see! I hadn't registered the very simple fact that items appeared on more than one list. *facepalm*

[thisbluespirit]

You weren't paying in depth attention to my oh so exciting statistics! How could you? ;-)

But you READ FIC and LEFT COMMENTS, and that is way more important. ♥

[justice-turtle.livejournal.com]

I stole your meme! :-)

[thisbluespirit]

Thief! ;-)

[femme-slash-fan.livejournal.com]

Well, I now know how to find other stories to read when I get stuck for ones on here... dig through the back history on your stuff. :)

[thisbluespirit]

Aw, thank you! :-)