here’s the thing: i don’t like obsessing over numbers (that’s the fastest way to drive yourself crazy on the internet), but i still like numbers, so i. y’know. made a spreadsheet to analyze my ao3 stats. because Numbers. (but also because i like throwing in the stats from friends’ fics when the numbers start getting into their heads and whispering horrible, horrible things. it’s gonna be okay, y’all ♥)
now, ao3 doesn’t have the best stats— the hit counter is a little arbitrary, because sometimes it registers when people hit “next chapter” but sometimes it doesn’t, and ofc some people just use “view entire work” and skip that step entirely, but! the only problem with that is that my numbers undershoot reality— that is, they say there are less people than there really are. (for real guys, popular fics will break the numbers, and by “break” i mean “there are more kudos on this fic than estimated number of readers”)
disclaimer: i have all of 39 fics on ao3, which is, yk, not very many.
the biggest numbers i track are hits per day and kudos per hit. (while i do track comments and bookmarks, i don’t get enough of them to really be significant, and they tend to reflect kudos and hits, anyway.)
hits per day is wildly skewed toward newer fics and a little bit toward multi-chaptered fics (thanks to that weird thing ao3 does with chapters and the hit counter), but it is especially useful when gauging lasting popularity for older fics.
this is how you tend to rank fics, and why you will be convinced that your fics are just Not As Popular As They Used To Be.
kudos per hit is a more interesting number, as it reflects how many people liked your fic enough to poke the button.
it is also ever-so-slightly skewed toward newer fics (not as many people have reread the newer fics, so there are less people coming back and raging that they can’t give more kudos)
more importantly, it has better numbers for one-shots (whether they be rare fandoms or rare pairs)
with that in mind, numbers!
my TOP hits per day fic is exactly the one i expected, mostly because i still get kudos notifications for the top fic every other day or so. it is over two years old, and it averages 11.43 hits per day. 11 whole eyes! every day! on this fic!!!
this is the kind of fic you know you should write to get attention: big ship, big fandom, delicious angst with a happy ending. the only thing working against it is its length, but it’s not particularly short, either, at a single chapter of just over 2.5k.
it was also written at the height of fandom popularity as well as my popularity specifically— people were at their most engaged, myself included.
(bonus numbers: this fic also sees the most kudos, at an average 1.22 kudos per day. for scale, my next most-kudos’d fic gets less than half that number, at 0.53 kudos per day.)
(bonus numbers again: the second-most popular fic sits at only 6.27 hits per day. that’s barely over half the number of my top fic.)
my top kudos per hit fic surprised me, as it plods along at only 2.31 hits per day (there are worse, but there are also definitely better). it gets one kudo for every 7.34 hits (13.61%). (turns out, this adds up reasonably well— i do in fact see kudos for it every 3-4 days.)
things that work for the fic: big fandom, vaguely shippy, humor abounds!, a solid friendship/slice of life fic, derived from another popular fic.
things that work against the fic: a mere 1521 words, mostly gen.
that said, my second highest kudos per hit fic has more interesting numbers, with one kudo every 7.69 hits (12.99%).
why is it more interesting? because it has 230 hits.
for reference, the top hits per day fic? 10.71% kudos to hits. out of 9000+ hits. so yeah, the top fic has more kudos, but guess which fic technically has a better approval rating? yup, my little 230-hit fic.
so what happened? let’s look at the list: in an older (shrinking, but dedicated) fandom, written for an event, inspired by two very friendly artists, on the short side at 3 chapters and 4.8k, rare pair.
by the way, my worst kudos per hit fic for that fandom? has the second-most hits, after the one top fic, and the third most kudos out of all my fics.(it’s multichaptered, though, and had a relatively regular update schedule, so people were definitely coming back for new chapters and triggering the hit counter.) (i’m not accounting for the number of hits vs number of readers skew, btw. it’s just. too much. too much.)
i can provide the link to the spreadsheet if anyone wants it. in the meantime, remember! numbers are weird as hell, don’t trust them when they try to tell you that a fic is less popular than you thought it would be.
