a non-reblog reblog (re Wattpad toastystats)
Sooooo, @elizabethminkel reblogged and replied to my Wattpad stats post with this lovely set of thoughts -- but then I went and updated the post, including updating one of the images, and now I’m in that state where I want to reblog and reply to Elizabeth’s comments, but not include the old version of the post. Soooo I’m gonna quote and respond here instead. :)
Aaaaaah! Really excited to dig into these stats, Toast! A few quick notes, just to be clear:
1) When we discussed Wattpad turning away from fanfiction, we were specifically talking about the platform, not its users. (I don’t think you made that assumption having listened, but I don’t know if it’s super clear from your description.) Wattpad has said things along the lines of, ‘Fanfiction has only ever been about 20% of our platform”—which it looks like it continues to be! So the interesting question here is how a platform continues to scale with user-generated content when a solid portion of that content has kind of maxed out monetarily. Like, more and more fic will be published on the site, but that doesn’t mean more and more profit for Wattpad or its users—which is a problem within the tech industry’s current models.
Yay, stats! So glad to be back producing stats again. :D
And thanks for the note, which totally makes sense (and was how I interpreted it as a listener, but I didn’t think about how my gloss would sound to readers) -- I updated my post (below the Keep reading cut, so click throughs from older reblogs will still get there) with a clarification.
2) I would expand on your “why don’t I know anyone who uses Wattpad” paragraph and even the bounds of “fanfiction” in these searches—much of the content on Wattpad is stuff some fans don’t consider fanfiction (fanworks for sure, just as headcanons can be considered fanworks, etc). I’m thinking of imagines, which are massive on the site, and not always labeled as such, or the bounds of what imagines can include, from literal headcanony prompts to full second-person self-inserts to choose-your-own-(admittedly-quite-short) adventures.
Yeah, great point! I’m hoping to dive into this more in upcoming stats -- as well as exploring which fandoms, ratings, etc. are getting the most fanworks, I’d love to cover all the types of works that are prominent on Wattpad but unusual to me (from my heavily AO3-influenced perspective). I’m still thinking about the best way to gather data (hand categorizing of a small sample? or clever use of search terms? not sure yet).
I also don’t feel that confident that I understand all the interesting types of works being produced. As well as imagines, I’ve found lots of #preferences, which I don’t really grok yet; a bunch of works with hundreds of chapters (but I haven’t yet investigated to see what’s in those chapters); and at least one work that was just the author tagging other usernames in the "story” field, followed by those users roleplaying in the comments. Really fascinating.
I’d love to dig into this a bit with you, because @flourish has done some data work with Wattpad in the past and the way they measure things like hits varies wildly from other platforms, so between that and what fanfiction even means to a lot of Wattpad users, it can feel like serious apples and oranges to look at them side-by-side. I’m curious if you feel that way?
I would LOVE to dig into this more with you and @flourish. And yes, I agree that it can be dubious to compare things that are too different (well, that’s actually a harsher take than what you said -- I agree about apples to oranges, but additionally feel like maybe I should be caveating harder that “these are not necessarily comparable things!!!1!”). As far as content goes, I did find a lot of stuff that looked like fic-as-I-know-it when I was hand classifying a small sample, so that reassured me that it’s not all imagines and other unfamiliar formats (so it’s sort of an apples to apples-and-oranges-and-pears comparison, content-wise, I guess? but I’d really like to quantify the number of oranges etc :) ). But story promotion and popularity metrics seem especially different on Wattpad than other platforms, and I am even more wary of doing unwarranted/misleading comparisons about those metrics. Would love to hear more of y’all’s thoughts there before I proceed.
