Writing Adjacent - Blog Posts

Kudos vs. Hits on AO3

Back in early 2017 I had a conversation with friend and fellow writer @pushtheheart​ about reader engagement on AO3. We’d noticed that, particularly on longer fics, kudos rates drop pretty sharply at a certain point and never really pick up again. Add to that, most of the comments on a new chapter tend to come in those first 24-48 hours after posting. Beyond that, you’re probably only going to see more if you’ve got one of those rare and marvellous spirits that binge-reads and leaves multiple comments as they go. This can feel pretty discouraging, particularly if you’re working hard toward the completion of a bigger project. It can seem like nobody is interested in what you’re doing now that you’re 20 chapters and three years in. Going on the assumption that the answer wasn’t simply, “we suck”, I started tracking kudos vs. hits over time on my longfic to look for trends. I don’t have any data previous to posting chapter 9 of 30, as the idea didn’t occur to me until then, but what I gathered after that was really interesting. I’m sharing it here for anyone else who enjoys data and is curious about this kind of thing!

But first, a note on engagement and expectations…

If you’ve ever put content on the internet you’re probably aware of the “1% rule” or “90-9-1″. Basically, it means the vast majority of people lurk and <10% will engage with the content they consume. For every 10 hits, you’ll get one engagement in the form of a like, kudos, a share, etc. Comments are a deeper level of engagement (community participation) so you’ll cut that down another 10:1. As an example, let’s say you put up a blog post that gets 1500 hits. Average-to-above-average engagement will see it get around 150 likes and 15 comments. I wanted to see if this was true for fic as well. And in general this does seem to be the case – with a few caveats.

This rule only really applies to fics with <10′000k hits. Once you cross that line, kudos drops sharply. There’s another sharp decline at 20′000 and, while I don’t expect to ever hit this mark, I imagine the same can be said for 30′000 or 40′000. I think this is likely due to established readership. The longer the fic is, the less people are likely to hop in unless it’s been personally recommended to them - most of your readers are already subbed. Eventually you’ll reach a point where the vast majority of engagement is made of these people: invested readers who have already left their kudos and their comments back when they first subscribed. 

In the old days of Newsgroups and alt.creative it was customary to leave comments on every chapter. There was no such thing as hit counts and likes so this was the only way to let someone know you read it. That’s not the case anymore. My working theory is that this is influenced by social media. It’s trained people to equate ‘many comments’ (or simply just high engagement) with ‘stalking’ because that kind of behavior on other mediums, like Facebook or Instagram, tends to raise eyebrows. As a result people are a little more gun-shy about leaving a bunch of comments. 

Here’s the data from my fic, Roses Where Thorns Grow. The Dragon Age fandom is in limbo right now as the last major chapter of the series came out in 2015 and we’re all sitting around awaiting the release of the next… so there’s not a ton of activity. DA fandom hit its peak in around 2014/2015. Many of the popular artists and authors have moved on, and it’s not really a particularly big or active community by comparison to mega-fandoms like The 100 or MCU or (apparently) Hockey RPF.

(Pic fixed, previous did not include kudos data for April-to-June of 2021)

The most obvious jump was when the pandemic hit and lockdown began. I don’t believe it had anything to do with the content of my fic or the posting schedule, it was a matter of people turning to AO3 to soothe their cabin fever. AO3 actually mentioned the same in various tweets and posts at the time!

Engagement spikes of statistical significance occurred in a few places:

1. The completion of “part one” and the beginning of “part two”. I’m not convinced this has to do with the content, as quite a few people later told me they bailed due to the subject matter not being their cup of tea. Rather, I think this is because of the soft ‘complete’ status. A lot of people refuse to read in-progress fic. Though I personally find that baffling. You’re missing so much good stuff!

2. Related, finishing the fic. Those in the above category tend to wait until something is done to leave their kudos.

3. A smut chapter. This is self-explanatory. Bioware fans are horny-ass motherfuckers.

3b. It’s worth noting at this point that posting outside of the weird AO3 update notification void of 12am-5am UTC also saw a difference exclusively in comments/hits on new chapters. It didn’t compare to these other spikes, but is absolutely worth keeping in mind. If you’re a night owl like me wait until after 5am UTC to post your updates. More information on this phenomenon can be found on @jenroses​‘ post about it, here.

4. By far the biggest and most significant jump: breaching page two of the pairing tag.

Nothing impacted by engagement more than this. Not being shared on Reddit, not story content, size, update speed or regularity, not self-promotion, not my own community engagement, nothing. It was so significant I could just about pin it to the day. Once I hit the very bottom of page two of “Female Lavellan/Solas” I got like 25 new followers (finally pushing me over 100), double the notes on my posts, viral spread of several Tumblr posts (I’m counting ‘viral’ as something over 500 notes), more comments, more kudos, more bookmarks, faster comments on new updates, several binge-readers and someone even made me my first fan art ( @nivenor-krosis​ ILU I think about this every single day). 

Now, I have nowhere near the following of the rock star writers in this fandom and never will – it’s taken me like 6 years to amass 120 people – and I’d love to blame that jump on being a nice person or a good writer or something, but the data really doesn’t support that. More than anything else, visibility impacts kudos. And, unfortunately, it seems you have to expect that once you start creeping toward 10k hits, regardless of that visibility, your kudos rate is going to dwindle exponentially. 

This data is a big part of why I decided to put up a post highlighting some lesser known authors and pin it to the top of my Tumblr. If you love an author, promote them! Reblog them. Like them. Recommend them. Talk about them. If you’re an author, reblog your own posts 10 times. More! And if you’re a reader who wants to find more really good fic, go past page two of the search results! There are a ton of gems back there that will never see more than a few hundred hits and are incredible reads - you’re missing out!