Webtoon must greenlight Cinderella boy's season 3 and I have proof
@nevernovember posted a few hours ago an analysis about prob and stats of CB, where they estimate how many new readers were drawn this month to the series and many more things.
That inspired me to make this post analyzing the success of CB by Webtoon standards from a statistical perspective, which I've decided to measure dividing it into two main parameters: Effectiveness in maintaining audience engagement and explicit expressions of support from the fandom.
First of all, it's necessary to establish what Webtoon considers successful, so we can use that as a basis for comparison.
I decided to pick the two most popular series in the whole site at the moment and the two series currently above CB in the Comedy category to do this.
These would be Osora, Tears on a Withered Flower, Change your Story and Swole mates.
At first, looking at their numbers and comparing them to CB's we might think that we're so far behind that having a season 3 would be pretty much a miracle.
BUT THIS DOES NOT WORK LIKE THAT.
In order to greenlight a new season, Webtoon needs to analyze if the series is making or not enough money for them, which can be measured in the number of people who currently fast pass, the amount of super likes that the audience gives and how engaged and interactive is its community to return each week, leave a like and comment. Big enterprises have access to lots of data and parameters that are not visible to the rest of the public that they can extract this information from much more precisely. My goal is to make a smaller, yet, somehow useful for our purposes version of this process with the information that we have access to.
Alright then, I'll start with the first parameter.
I. Effectiveness in maintaining audience engagement
Some of these series have more than 100k likes in their first episodes, but that's not a good way to tell how well they're maintaining a consistent fan base to this day (at least on Webtoon).
To estimate this, I took the number of likes and comments on all of these series' first episodes and divided it by the numbers they managed to get in their most recent chapters. I made sure that the episodes I chose to represent their most recent numbers were no more than 5 days apart so that the comparison would be as fair as possible.
These results show the ratio of their current numbers to the initial ones, which came from the public they attracted at the beginning. I then used this data to calculate their effectiveness with another simple division.
Here are some rough drafts of my calculations. I only put two of them for the sake of this post not being too boring but I promise I did the same for all the series.
Now, after repetiting this a few more times, these are the results:
EFFECTIVENESS ON MAINTAINING INTERACTION THROUGH COMMENTS:
Cinderella boy: 1.4
Osora: 0.28
Tears on a Withered Flower: 0.099
Swole mates: 0.077
EFFECTIVENESS ON MAINTAINING INTERACTION THROUGH LIKES:
Cinderella boy: 0.26
Osora: 0.22
Tears on a Withered Flower: 0.11
Swole mates: 0.29
(I'm not including Change your Story in this parameter because, unlike the others who have been on Webtoon for more than 3 years, it only has 9 months in the site; it seems quite unfair).
I really want us to pay attention to these results because they're just impressive, especially the interaction through comments. All of the other series have lost some portion of its interaction along the way, especially the two last ones that cannot even compare their current numbers of interaction to the ones they obtained at the beginning. And CB not only maintained them, but it made them GROW, surpassing by 40% the amount of comments it got in its first episode.
I think this is beautiful evidence of just how active and passionate the CB community is, especially now that we're approaching the end of season 2.
To make this clearer, here's a graphic showing all the data.
After a few more calculations, I got this straightforward comparison of CB with the other series:
INTERACTION THROUGH COMMENTS:
CB is 14.1 times more effective than TWF.
CB is 18.2 times more effective than Swole mates.
CB is 5 times more effective than Osora.
INTERACTION THROUGH LIKES:
CB is 1.2 times more effective than Osora.
CB is 2.36 times more effective than TWF.
Swole Mates is 1.16 times more effective than CB.
With the exception of this last one, all the other comparisons put CB as clearly more capable of retaining an audience that engages with the series.
AND THIS IS ALREADY A GREAT SIGN.
Now, onto the second parameter.
II. Explicit expressions of support from the fandom
I could talk about how big and passionate the CB fandom is in a lot of different aspects, but the one Webtoon focuses on is how much money the audience can give to the comic, so let's look at the super likes.
First of all, I will give you the rough data:
SUPER LIKES:
Cinderella boy: 27.7k
Osora: 17.1k
Tears on a Withered Flower doesn't have the option to give super likes.
Swole mates: 12.3k
Change your Story: 2.1k
Now, just comparing this data like this would be unfair, because not all these series have started at the same time: some have had more time to gain super likes and others may have a solid fan base but just haven't got enough time to gain all that interaction (since the people who give super likes need to be able to support the series month by month while still paying bills).
So, I divided the amount of super likes each series has with the amount of months they have been around to find a rough estimate of how many super likes each series receives per month.
Considering:
Cinderella boy: 43 months
Osora: 39 months
Swole mates: 37 months
Change your Story: 9 months
These are the results:
CB: 644.2
Osora: 438.5
Swole mates: 332.4
Change your Story: 233.4
Once again, CB stands as the series with the most active fandom. Even taking into account the fact that all of the other series have more views regularly, it's not clear that this would mean they make more money, especially because of what we've seen with the super likes.
Well, all of this was to say that CB is a very successful comic and that, clearly, it surpasses all the most popular series on Webtoon in some aspects (hopefully, the aspects that Webtoon takes into account for promoting a series further).
I think there's a great chance that we'll have a season 3 (fingers crossed), but we need to keep supporting CB all the ways we can so this can be a reality!!
Thank you for reading all of this :D
Notes:
This is gonna sound incredibly boring but I think it's important. Everything that I just said I did has a very poor method and from an investigation perspective, so many flaws. For example, it would have been way more accurate to not compare the numbers of the first and latest episodes of each series, but to instead take the simple arithmetic mean of the data from at least the ten first chapters and the ten last and use those calculations to not have results as biased as mine are.
Thing is, I just did this for fun and I still think it can give us a good idea of how everything is looking for CB right now so, for now, I will leave it this way.
Maybe this way I can focus on more important stuff like calculating how many years in prison Likenapple would have to serve for all their crimes, sounds fun.
