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Yet another post about comments and reading habits. But this one has numbers!
Because everyone complains about the weather, you know. But no one does anything about it.
Comments are down. I mean, I’m not the only one who’s noticed this. There’s been desultory chatter at my end of LJ about this phenomenon in the last few months: posts that a couple of years ago would have drawn several dozen comments (or maybe even 100) now get a handful. I wasn’t that much fussed about it. Maybe I’m just less interesting, or less engaged with the fanon and canon. Except thatpir8fancier and others were noticing the same thing on their journals, too.
And then I occurred to me that now would be an interesting time to run the numbers. To collect and tally and think about the numbers generated by some hit counters I put on some of my stories and meta a year ago. The numbers of hits have been piling up for a year, and now would be a nice time to evaluate what they might tell us about reading habits and commenting.
As I told my flist at the time, I used free (almost) invisible hit counters from statcounter.com on some of my meta and fics on this journal (and not my personal journal, I hasten to add). The counters will collect all sorts of info (including the referring site) if you put it on your own website or archive, I’m told. But on LJ, the design and frames of LJ limit what it will collect to the number of hits and unique visitors. Which was fine, to me. I only wanted to know how many people were reading my stuff and not who they were or where they came from.
At the time, I was mostly interested in finding out how many people read on IJ compared to LJ, and on the popularity of meta vs. fiction. And my counters did yield information on those points. But what was even more interesting was something I hadn’t set out to study: the ratio of hits to comments and how that varies over time.
If I had more time to fiddle with formatting, I’d make nice tables of the numbers below. Or even some more elaborate quantitative analysis. But I don’t have the time, so I won’t. But even the raw numbers are interesting.
I also include some numbers given to me by the lovelymeri_oddities, whom I persuaded to put in hit counters on her stories, on her website, around the same time that I did. I also got pir8fancier to do the same. Both of them recorded a vastly greater number of hits on their stories, since they’re much better (and better-known) writers. But the ratio of comments to hits that they got paralleled mine; the pattern was the same, even if the scale was larger.
Some Cool Shiny Numbers
In each case, I’ve given the number of unique visitors for my posts (Meri’s is her total number of hits) first, and the number of comments left for each story/meta in parentheses. The pairings for fics are indicated, since I was also interested in comparing hits and comments for major vs. minor pairings. Note that this is only a sampling of all the stories and meta I embedded counters in; I was interested in showing typical examples, but I had a lot more data that I’m too busy to type up.
Hits for Stories with a Hit Counter Embedded From the Start
(these are stories or meta posted in the past year, where I was able to capture all the hits from the beginning):
A Lesson In Wandlore (Ollivander/Snape), posted as part of the![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/community.gif)
hp_beholder fest: 548 (29)
HP on LJ: a feeble attempt at fannish humor (humor) 1,214 (54)
HP on LJ on IJ 921 (14)
At the Con (meta) on IJ 46 (1)
At the Con on LJ 210 (9)
Sparkling Clean (Snape/Harry) on IJ 618 (6)
Sparkling Clean on LJ 299 (6)
On the Attractions of Cross gen with particular reference to Snarry (meta) on LJ 319 (10)
On the Attractions of Cross gen with particular reference to Snarry on IJ 206 (5)
Hits for Stories or Meta Where the Counter was Embedded More Than A Year After the Original Post:
Stories published more than a year before the counter was installed:
A Hiding To Nothing (Snape/Harry) bymeri_oddities: 5,435 (0)
Sanguis Vinculum (Snape/Harry) bymeri_oddities 8,259 (2)
Property Rites (Snape/Harry) on LJ : 1,229 (2)
Consolation Prize (Snape/Harry) on LJ: 1,189 (1)
Consolation Prize on IJ: 228 (0)
Justice for Severus Snape (a meta polemic, written just after Book 7 came out) on LJ 1,210
So much for the numbers. Here are some observations drawn from them, and from a more detailed breakdown of when the post appeared vs. when comments and later hits were recorded.
*Minor pairings don’t do so badly. Both my Snape/Ollivander story listed above and some of the other Snape rarepairs almost matched the Snape/Harry stories in the number of visitors they attracted when first posted. Where they differed, and slowly fell behind the major pairing stories, was in their “legs”: the overwhelming majority of hits came in the first month after a rarepair story was posted, whereas the Snarries just keep chugging along, attracting visitors every day of the week, month after month
*IJ has more readers than I would have guessed. In most cases, the difference wasn’t as great as I would have expected, based on where the comments came from. As it turns out, IJ posts can attract substantial numbers of readers. But they seem slightly less likely to comment (I’d need to do more quantitative analysis to be sure of this, but that’s my impression).
*Meta doesn’t have “legs” either, in most cases. Like the rarepairs, meta posts got the overwhelming bulk of hits very early on, and then go for weeks at a time with no new hits. Some of the few exceptions to this rule are listed above; apparently a few of my meta posts---particularly “Justice for Severus Snape” are linked or recced elsewhere, since they continue to attract a steady trickle of hits.
*The ratio of comments to hits is MUCH lower than you’d expect. It’s a cliché to say that only 5% of readers leave comments. In fact, the real number is much lower. BUT it depends on when you’re talking about: early on, after a story is first posted, it’s much more likely that someone will leave a comment. Once the story’s been posted a while, it becomes very, very unlikely that it will attract a comment:
For example, my two longest and best known Snarries are “Consolation Prize” and “Property Rites.” Both have been rec’ed and linked to by various well-known rec’ers and they each attract several new readers every day. But both were posted years before I put in those hit counters, and readers who find the stories later are very unlikely to leave a comment: “Property Rites” has attracted 1,229 readers over the last year, but got only two new comments in that time. Meri’s stories (posted long before she put in the counters) show similar results.
Once your story has been up for more than a month or so, it will continue to attract readers, especially if it’s a major pairing. But the odds that these readers will leave a comment decline rapidly over time. If it’s a stranger coming to your website, as with Meri’s stories, then the chances that the person will leave a comment or email drop to effectively zero.
But if the story is posted on IJ or LJ, odds are that it will attract some comments in the beginning, and sometimes even more than 5% of all readers. “A Lesson in Wandlore” has attracted 548 visitors in total over the last year, but 362 of those came in the first two months. Those 362 visitors left 28 comments in total (almost 8%). Of the 186 readers who have come since then, only one (a person known to me, whom I’d linked to the story) left a comment.
The pattern was also reflected in Meri’s Escaping the Paradox (Snape/Harry), a well-received entry in last year’s Snarry Games. The story attracted a bonus crop of comments soon after it appeared in the Games, 374 comments in all. But after the Games ended, Mari altered the link to the story to refer to her personal website. Since then, the story has attracted 6,348 hits (Meri’s readership is on a whole different scale than mine), but only 11 new comments.
Here’s my best guess about all this: you are much more likely to get comments early on because stories posted on LJ are published into a culture of comment: your friends, your friends’ friends, the readers of the exchange or fest you’re posting with. All those people are part of a culture which encourages readers to leave comments and give writers feedback or support. So, your first readers are heavily drawn from that culture, and they’re more likely to comment. But once the story has been up for a while, you’re probably getting readers from all over, and perhaps from circles further removed from your friends’ friends. And perhaps for that reason, readers become much less likely to leave comments.
But what do I know? I know this sounds cliché and insincere, but swear to God, my hand over my heart: it never was about sheer numbers of comments, for me. I came here looking for a good conversation, which isn’t quite the same thing. I like the comments and ideas and questions that people leave on my stories, and my meta in particular. That engagement and discussion is what feeds me. I’m a meta person, at heart.
I put up the counters because I was curious about the readership for meta vs. fic, and realized that I was the perfect test case for that particular question: you could compare hits for meta and stories with the same writer and the same flist. And I wondered about LJ vs. IJ.
But what I found was something else. Or additional information. And I found that the evidence of the counters itself was heartening. Even if someone doesn’t leave a comment, I know that the story or meta was read. It really is gratifying to know that your earlier contributions live on, and continue to get readers. So, I’d encourage all of you to try this. You’d be surprised (Meri certainly was!): because long, long after your story has ceased to get comments, it is still being read and enjoyed and you can get hard evidence of this, with the counters.
It makes you feel good. Warm fuzzies and shiny numbers. Lovely.
Because everyone complains about the weather, you know. But no one does anything about it.
Comments are down. I mean, I’m not the only one who’s noticed this. There’s been desultory chatter at my end of LJ about this phenomenon in the last few months: posts that a couple of years ago would have drawn several dozen comments (or maybe even 100) now get a handful. I wasn’t that much fussed about it. Maybe I’m just less interesting, or less engaged with the fanon and canon. Except that
pir8fancier and others were noticing the same thing on their journals, too. And then I occurred to me that now would be an interesting time to run the numbers. To collect and tally and think about the numbers generated by some hit counters I put on some of my stories and meta a year ago. The numbers of hits have been piling up for a year, and now would be a nice time to evaluate what they might tell us about reading habits and commenting.
As I told my flist at the time, I used free (almost) invisible hit counters from statcounter.com on some of my meta and fics on this journal (and not my personal journal, I hasten to add). The counters will collect all sorts of info (including the referring site) if you put it on your own website or archive, I’m told. But on LJ, the design and frames of LJ limit what it will collect to the number of hits and unique visitors. Which was fine, to me. I only wanted to know how many people were reading my stuff and not who they were or where they came from.
At the time, I was mostly interested in finding out how many people read on IJ compared to LJ, and on the popularity of meta vs. fiction. And my counters did yield information on those points. But what was even more interesting was something I hadn’t set out to study: the ratio of hits to comments and how that varies over time.
If I had more time to fiddle with formatting, I’d make nice tables of the numbers below. Or even some more elaborate quantitative analysis. But I don’t have the time, so I won’t. But even the raw numbers are interesting.
I also include some numbers given to me by the lovely
meri_oddities, whom I persuaded to put in hit counters on her stories, on her website, around the same time that I did. I also got pir8fancier to do the same. Both of them recorded a vastly greater number of hits on their stories, since they’re much better (and better-known) writers. But the ratio of comments to hits that they got paralleled mine; the pattern was the same, even if the scale was larger.Some Cool Shiny Numbers
In each case, I’ve given the number of unique visitors for my posts (Meri’s is her total number of hits) first, and the number of comments left for each story/meta in parentheses. The pairings for fics are indicated, since I was also interested in comparing hits and comments for major vs. minor pairings. Note that this is only a sampling of all the stories and meta I embedded counters in; I was interested in showing typical examples, but I had a lot more data that I’m too busy to type up.
Hits for Stories with a Hit Counter Embedded From the Start
(these are stories or meta posted in the past year, where I was able to capture all the hits from the beginning):
A Lesson In Wandlore (Ollivander/Snape), posted as part of the
hp_beholder fest: 548 (29) HP on LJ: a feeble attempt at fannish humor (humor) 1,214 (54)
HP on LJ on IJ 921 (14)
At the Con (meta) on IJ 46 (1)
At the Con on LJ 210 (9)
Sparkling Clean (Snape/Harry) on IJ 618 (6)
Sparkling Clean on LJ 299 (6)
On the Attractions of Cross gen with particular reference to Snarry (meta) on LJ 319 (10)
On the Attractions of Cross gen with particular reference to Snarry on IJ 206 (5)
Hits for Stories or Meta Where the Counter was Embedded More Than A Year After the Original Post:
Stories published more than a year before the counter was installed:
A Hiding To Nothing (Snape/Harry) by
meri_oddities: 5,435 (0)Sanguis Vinculum (Snape/Harry) by
meri_oddities 8,259 (2) Property Rites (Snape/Harry) on LJ : 1,229 (2)
Consolation Prize (Snape/Harry) on LJ: 1,189 (1)
Consolation Prize on IJ: 228 (0)
Justice for Severus Snape (a meta polemic, written just after Book 7 came out) on LJ 1,210
So much for the numbers. Here are some observations drawn from them, and from a more detailed breakdown of when the post appeared vs. when comments and later hits were recorded.
*Minor pairings don’t do so badly. Both my Snape/Ollivander story listed above and some of the other Snape rarepairs almost matched the Snape/Harry stories in the number of visitors they attracted when first posted. Where they differed, and slowly fell behind the major pairing stories, was in their “legs”: the overwhelming majority of hits came in the first month after a rarepair story was posted, whereas the Snarries just keep chugging along, attracting visitors every day of the week, month after month
*IJ has more readers than I would have guessed. In most cases, the difference wasn’t as great as I would have expected, based on where the comments came from. As it turns out, IJ posts can attract substantial numbers of readers. But they seem slightly less likely to comment (I’d need to do more quantitative analysis to be sure of this, but that’s my impression).
*Meta doesn’t have “legs” either, in most cases. Like the rarepairs, meta posts got the overwhelming bulk of hits very early on, and then go for weeks at a time with no new hits. Some of the few exceptions to this rule are listed above; apparently a few of my meta posts---particularly “Justice for Severus Snape” are linked or recced elsewhere, since they continue to attract a steady trickle of hits.
*The ratio of comments to hits is MUCH lower than you’d expect. It’s a cliché to say that only 5% of readers leave comments. In fact, the real number is much lower. BUT it depends on when you’re talking about: early on, after a story is first posted, it’s much more likely that someone will leave a comment. Once the story’s been posted a while, it becomes very, very unlikely that it will attract a comment:
For example, my two longest and best known Snarries are “Consolation Prize” and “Property Rites.” Both have been rec’ed and linked to by various well-known rec’ers and they each attract several new readers every day. But both were posted years before I put in those hit counters, and readers who find the stories later are very unlikely to leave a comment: “Property Rites” has attracted 1,229 readers over the last year, but got only two new comments in that time. Meri’s stories (posted long before she put in the counters) show similar results.
Once your story has been up for more than a month or so, it will continue to attract readers, especially if it’s a major pairing. But the odds that these readers will leave a comment decline rapidly over time. If it’s a stranger coming to your website, as with Meri’s stories, then the chances that the person will leave a comment or email drop to effectively zero.
But if the story is posted on IJ or LJ, odds are that it will attract some comments in the beginning, and sometimes even more than 5% of all readers. “A Lesson in Wandlore” has attracted 548 visitors in total over the last year, but 362 of those came in the first two months. Those 362 visitors left 28 comments in total (almost 8%). Of the 186 readers who have come since then, only one (a person known to me, whom I’d linked to the story) left a comment.
The pattern was also reflected in Meri’s Escaping the Paradox (Snape/Harry), a well-received entry in last year’s Snarry Games. The story attracted a bonus crop of comments soon after it appeared in the Games, 374 comments in all. But after the Games ended, Mari altered the link to the story to refer to her personal website. Since then, the story has attracted 6,348 hits (Meri’s readership is on a whole different scale than mine), but only 11 new comments.
Here’s my best guess about all this: you are much more likely to get comments early on because stories posted on LJ are published into a culture of comment: your friends, your friends’ friends, the readers of the exchange or fest you’re posting with. All those people are part of a culture which encourages readers to leave comments and give writers feedback or support. So, your first readers are heavily drawn from that culture, and they’re more likely to comment. But once the story has been up for a while, you’re probably getting readers from all over, and perhaps from circles further removed from your friends’ friends. And perhaps for that reason, readers become much less likely to leave comments.
But what do I know? I know this sounds cliché and insincere, but swear to God, my hand over my heart: it never was about sheer numbers of comments, for me. I came here looking for a good conversation, which isn’t quite the same thing. I like the comments and ideas and questions that people leave on my stories, and my meta in particular. That engagement and discussion is what feeds me. I’m a meta person, at heart.
I put up the counters because I was curious about the readership for meta vs. fic, and realized that I was the perfect test case for that particular question: you could compare hits for meta and stories with the same writer and the same flist. And I wondered about LJ vs. IJ.
But what I found was something else. Or additional information. And I found that the evidence of the counters itself was heartening. Even if someone doesn’t leave a comment, I know that the story or meta was read. It really is gratifying to know that your earlier contributions live on, and continue to get readers. So, I’d encourage all of you to try this. You’d be surprised (Meri certainly was!): because long, long after your story has ceased to get comments, it is still being read and enjoyed and you can get hard evidence of this, with the counters.
It makes you feel good. Warm fuzzies and shiny numbers. Lovely.