Podfic Stats 4: Feedback distributions for Podfics on AO3
A fandom can be big without being generous, and enthusiasm for a few works does not translate into support for everyone’s work. Creators contributing to many fandoms know to change their feedback expectations with the size and style of each group. You’ll have to infer why fandoms behave one way or another, this post is just letting you know the facts for podfics. Some of this may carry over to other types of works.
On the graphs: These report the cumulative distributions of feedback across podfics within each fandom on three different measure of popularity: Hits, Kudos, and Comments. A cumulative distribution reports the percentage of works with fewer than the x-axis value. This is why all of these lines start low and end up at 100. Notice also the x-axis is always a logarithmic scale: most works get little feedback while a tiny portion get a lot and it would be hard to see the lines on a linear scale.
As always, the graphs can be inspected interactively on the source Google Spreadsheet, so if you want to check how your works compare inside and outside your fandom, click through and use the cursors to get exact values. Don’t worry, no one will know.
Here are some points to get the speculation juices flowing:
Teen Wolf podficcers have not only made the most podfic, their works get eaten up! 70% of their podfics have over 700 hits, while in the Supernatural fandom, the next biggest, less than 20% get that kind of action.
It may look like the Harry Potter podfic are often neglected, but the 17% with less than 10 hits are probably works by authors who chose not to have hits shown. Why is this group so secretive?
Many podfics get verily little attention. At least 850 get less than 100 hits, more than 10% of all podfics on AO3.
Bandom shows the lowest hit rates across all percentiles, but that may be because its composed of many sub-fandoms. It still fairs worse than the catch all “Other” podfics, the 3900 which did not belong to the 7 big fandoms.
On Kudos (Here is where we see the love start to shine through.)
All big fandoms have some few podfics with over 150 kudos (1 to 11 works, yeah, not a lot)
The median number of kudos for all podfics on AO3 is 5, but in Sherlock, MCU and TW, it’s 12,13, and 23 respectively! These fandoms are also quick to show love to new works, as barely any have less than 2 kudos.
The left of the dark line of 1 kudos shows a lot of podfic don’t get any, nearly 15% in smaller fandoms.
On comments: These are even rarer than Kudos, and the differences between fandoms is similar to the previous charts.
Across all of AO3, the median number of comments is 2 and 35%(more 2500 podfics) never get any.
Even in the most active fandomes, at least 12% get no written feedback.
Here again, in Bandom and Supernatural we see the fewest comments, more than 80% have fewer than 5 comments, the median for Teen Wolf and Sherlock
Look at the averages per fandom, Sherlock had the highest rate of comments per work, and looking at this graph, we can see this advantage is actually concentrated at the top. This fandom is neck-in-neck with Teen Wolf until the 20 comments mark, exceeding the 2/3 work count differences above 40 comments.
A note on these counts: Fandoms were aggregated using AO3 tag associations, and podfics embedded in text fic entries were excluded, as they get much more traffic.
