Hi Toasty! Forgive an older person for asking an overly simple question, but I've been struggling to look this up on your blog. Have you ever done any stats on chapter length/number and kudos/hits? I understand that adding another variable aside from ratings may make things too complicated, but I found myself wondering how that might relate to your previous results.
I haven't looked much at chapters rather than overall fanwork length, so I probably don't have exactly what you're after. But perhaps someone who reads my blog will have done relevant analyses looking at length/rating/popularity, and they can reply with links to their work!
(Also, no apologies needed at all; my fandom stats are not all that easy to search through when it comes to some topics -- even I have trouble sometimes. :) )
Here are my most relevant bits of data analysis & meta:
Do longer fanworks get more hits on AO3? - Back in 2013, I found that multi-chapter works got more hits on average than single-chapter works... but then I dug in further and found that actually, the underlying effect was that LONGER works got more hits than shorter works, regardless of whether they have one chapter or multiple chapters. (Because multi-chapter works tend to have a higher word count than single-chapter ones, they appear to get more hits on average. But once you control for word count, that difference goes away.) Caveats: I haven't checked this again since 2013. And I didn't break down "multi-chapter" by actual number of chapters.
Ratings on AO3: how do they relate to popularity and word count? - I was once again looking at this back in 2013. At the time, I found that the higher the rating, the more hits and kudos a work gets. However, this is partly because the more explicit the fanworks, the longer it tends to be -- and as we saw above, longer works get more hits on average. Once you compare works of equal length, there is a smaller correlation between ratings and kudos, and it mostly is driven by longer works (10K+ words). Although "Explicit" fanworks get substantially more hits/kudos on average than the other ratings, for every word count. Caveats: here I wasn't looking at number of chapters at all -- just word count. Also, like I said, not updated since 2013.
Also, just in case you meant "have you looked at the rate of kudos per hits" rather than "have you looked at either kudos or hits" -- I talk in How can you tell if a fanwork is popular on AO3? about many reasons why kudos/hits is an unreliable metric of popularity.
I also have a few other analyses looking at how hits and kudos relate to other things in my Popularity Metrics collection. One takeaway from this series is that both the fandom you're in and the platform you're posting fanworks to (e.g., AO3, FFNet, Wattpad) make a BIG difference to the average amount of reader response. Another takeaway is that the majority of fanworks don't get very much reader response (hits, kudos, comments) at all. That's not unique to AO3, though -- anywhere that people post a ton of content, there is likely to be a whole bunch of stuff that very few people have discovered yet. (There are some fandom challenges encouraging folks to seek out and leave feedback for such undiscovered fanworks, which I think is lovely.)
Hope some of this helps a bit -- and as I said, I hope others will chip in with related works!
