The daily advertisement

M Y   E X P E R I E N C E - So like most of you I've been wondering for the longest time wether a daily feature would be worth the thousands of karma points or not. Back in the days I started a graphics shop to earn my karma fairly and by the time I reached a 9000 kp I took a small break from AFF. Now that I'm back I'm more like 'yolo' and decided to give it a go. The whole karma system is collapsed anyway and I an not sure if I could easily regain my karma again if I want to.

I decided to try the 1 hour advertisement multiple times via different pages on AFF. Sometimes via 'popular' and sometimes via 'tags'. In the most recent example I went with popular, which gained me 3 new subscribers out of 23 views. I know earlier on that I tried it via tags and there I gained 6 subscribers and about 40 ish views. Not sure anymore. So there's proof that some pages within AFF that automatically have more views than others.

Secondly I finally tried the daily advertisement, but the m-rated one. My story would be advertised on AFF for 24 hours, until the next bidding would close again. I started off with 2474 views and 146 subscribers and after the advertisement period was over I had 2 new upvotes, 94 new subscribers and 834 extra views. And I think I paid 4610 kp for my bid. So yeah, I paid 49 kp on average per extra sub. Expensive? Let's compare to the 1 hour ad: The average views I had for a 1 hour adwas around 30 and the average of new subs was 5. You pay 100 kp for that, so on average you pay 20 kp per sub.
 

Q U E S T I O N S   &   A N S W ER S -  Q: Are 1 hour advertisements worth it? A: Absolutely. It is fairly cheap. Especially if you don't mind building up your reader fanbase slowly. Q: Are daily advertisements worth it? A: Not really? I feel 50 kp per subscriber is expensive. If you quickly need a larger fanbase, then yes. This is the only way, I guess. Q: Which one would you buy again? A: Only the one hour advertisement or maybe when I complete one of my stories of which I think are really worth trying. Q: Are there other ways to promote stories? A: I would really try advertisment shops or advertising around via people's walls yourself. It would probably be the in-between option where one hour ads do too little for you and where daily advertisements are too expensive. I'd say this would be a good solution too. 

G E N E R A L   T I P S - Some tips in general before you advertise your story: 1. Have at least 1/3rd of the chapters published and finished. People often aren't subscribing over 1 or 2 chapters, unless it is meant as a one or two shot. I think most people even prefer the story being finished first before they subscribe, so they KNOW it's safe. Some people ditch their stories half way and AFF readers are extremely tired of it. They'd rather be safe than sorry. 2. You cannot change the main characters, the genre or the overall vibe (and fonts) anymore once you promote something on a large scale. You are most likely lose subscribers if you do, so make sure you are a 100% satisfied with your concept and writing. 3. Be aware that popular idols/groups/themes will most likely attract more subs regardless. Same goes for m-rated vs regular fics. M-rated will attract more subs. The third one to top things off is that or yuri fics most likely gain more subscribers than hetero fics, etc. If you advertise there is no guarantee that all tags/subjects/characters will attract as many subscribers as the other people's story did the day before you.

All of these are not my opinion, but a general opinion of the average reader on AFF. I've been around for a few years now to estimate an average of this. So please do not shoot me. I'm just the messenger. I hope this blog post was helpful. Feel free to ask me more :)