Hey all!

So, I have no idea if that would interest anyone, but I've been tracking my fanfiction statistics since summer 2021 just for the sake of it (and because I already do this all day at my job and don't know how to live without analyzing stats for everything), and I thought it could be interesting to see what trends come out of it. I don't think this will be groundbreaking per se, but it might (or not) confirm some trends that we often see online.

I just want to preface this by saying that I'm personally fairly emotionally detached from those numbers, I don't really care if a story does well or not. Also, if your stats look nothing like mine (whether you have more or less traffic on your stories), remember that it doesn't mean anything about the quality of your writing. Getting traffic on your fics depends a lot on how you're tagging them, if and where you're advertising them, if you write for a famous fandom/pairing, etc.

What I'll show is the sum of my stats on AO3 and AFF. I've been tracking the following:

• Hits (AO3) and Views (AFF)
• Kudos (AO3) and Upvotes (AFF)
• Comment threads (both on AO3 & AFF)
• Subscriptions (both on AO3 & AFF)

One thing to note is that the combination of subscriptions on the two platforms is imperfect, as they don't exactly serve the same purpose on both platforms:

• on AO3, people subscribe to a story to get notified when it gets updated. Therefore, one-shots usually have a very low amount of subscriptions;
• on AFF, all my stories are Subscribers only, which means that anyone that wishes to read it will have to be subscribed.

Also, I decided to not track bookmarks on AO3. Since a lot of users bookmark stories privately, it wouldn't be representative of the number of people actually saving a story.

Another small explanation of the key I'm using:

• circle: one-shot or short story without any (General or Teen audience on AO3);
• upside-down triangle: one-shot or short story with (Mature or Explicit on AO3, rated M on AFF);
• square: medium to long story (there might be at some point in those but it's not the focus of the story), posted during an extended period of time;
• the colors don't hold any meaning.

With that out of the way, let's look at the stats:

(fig. 1: Hits & Views)

We can obviously see that the long story Hybrids is way higher than the others in terms of views—however, we need to take into account that this story has been available on AFF for literal years (at least 9) until I rewrote it, which partly explains the high amount of traffic.

Despite that, the stories with more traffic are stories with multiple chapters that were posted at separate times. The stories bunched up at the bottom of the graph are stories that were posted at once.

For this reason, if you are looking to generate traffic even with your short stories, it looks more interesting to split the story into a few parts and post them at different times.

(fig. 2: Kudos & Upvotes)

Quite unsurprisingly, we also see long stories have a higher number of votes, since they usually generate more traffic.

It's interesting to see that rated short stories also have a good amount of votes (and have a higher views-to-vote ratio—because people can only leave a vote one time, but will be counted as several views when they come back to read an update).

Overall, non-rated short stories generate fewer votes, so authors know readers are .

(fig. 3: Comments)

Despite the high amount of votes, rated stories do very badly in terms of comments, which I personally find is a shame! But I understand people don't necessarily want to proactively interact with that kind of content.

Then, unsurprisingly, stories with multiple chapters generate a lot of engagement, but only while they're being updated. After the story is completed, people tend to less interact with it.

(fig. 4: Subscriptions)

Here too, I just want to point out that the high amount of subscribers to Hydrids is due to it having been on the platform for way longer than my other stories.

As the amount of subscriptions is very low on AO3, I will consider this graph to only represent AFF. Moreover, I like to interpret subscriptions as an intent to read a story. With that, we can see that the intent is higher for rated stories, as well as long ones. As the act of subscribing happens mostly after only reading the summary and foreword, I'd say take some extra time to craft those!

If you've read this far, I hope you could take anything from it, and if not, then ask yourself why you did bother reading the whole thing ;)

Have you also noticed any trends on your side?

Anyway, this was just for fun, keep writing what makes you thrive, and don't get too caught up on your stats, the most important is that you're enjoying yourself! <3