Not to hate on AO3 in the least, but wow their stats page really is weird and silly, and it’s no wonder I completely ignored it for 5 years. Like, okay. If you filter your stats to ‘2020,′ it doesn’t give you ‘number of hits per work within 2020,′ like you might expect.
Giving you a sense of traffic to your different fics and whether, say, posting something new has revitalized interest in an old work on hiatus, or hey people are reading your stuff in this one particular fandom again. Or whatever a chronological stats breakdown might be useful for. No.
It gives you total number of hits, ever, to works updated in 2020. Which is data I could compile pretty easily by hand just by referring to my ‘works’ page, since that’s organized chronologically already!
And which is not the data I want when trying to figure out how my rambling 60-part niche batman fandom series is doing in terms of ongoing interest.
I suspect that, like my previous observation about AO3 not providing data about how many words there are per chapter, the archive isn’t actually set up to log the data I want in the first place, so the stats page is just Giving Us What They’ve Got. But the interface is set up to look like it’s providing somewhat different data, which can be confusing.
