Attract Those Readers: When to Post on Ao3
Miraculous Fanworks Guide: When to post and when not to post on Ao3
Do you struggle to attract readers to your Ao3 fanfictions? Looking to boost your numbers on a fic?
Then you’ve come to the right place!
When to post to get those eyeballs on your piece:
Using a script they coded themselves, Olcalhoun conducted a year-long study of Ao3′s posting times tracking four things:
How many users were online.
How many new stories were posted in the last 10 minutes.
How many stories were added to the feature box in the last 10 minutes.
How many stories were in both the ‘new’ and ‘featured’ boxes.
Olcalhoun collected over 50,000 data points, and found that the best times to post on Ao3 were Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, from 12pm to 5pm PST.
However, if there’s a good time to post, when is the worst time to post? The answer, provided in this post by jenroses, is anytime between 5pm and 10pm PST. The worst day to post overall is Friday.
Turns out there’s a bug in Ao3′s system. If you post during that time, your story will have a manually-set publication date.
What this means is if you post between 5pm and 10pm PST, your story will not appear on the top of the new stories in the tag.
Your story will appear “earlier” than those stories–lower on the front page than stories posted hours before.
do post on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday from 12pm to 5pm PST
do not post on Friday, or from 5pm to 10pm anyday