Webstats review

[indri]

I've been running two webcounters on my site now for about a week. I've no way to know if this has been a "typical" week, but if so, the results have been quite sobering.

I'm averaging about 60 pageloads and 25 visitors a day.

Types of visitor, in rough order of frequency, from most to least common:

people who come to use the recs page, without looking at the rest of the site;

people who arrive via All About Spike or some other author listing or recs page, and who stay to read a couple of stories;

people googling for pictures of BtVS characters or lemurs;

lost folk who google for unlikely combinations of words, and who are more likely than the others to be from non-English-speaking countries;

people who have found the URL via Coquette's website or FangedFour and, on realising I don't write Spike/Angelus, leave almost immediately afterwards;

people who arrive with no related link, suggesting they have bookmarked the site or in some other way have recorded the URL;

people who find my site by googling for specific story titles, which suggests they've heard of me somehow;

someone in Boston who spent most of her Sunday afternoon working her way through my entire story archive (thanks!).

The upshot is that my recs page provides a valuable community service but that not terribly many people read my stories at my website (I'm archived in multiple places so my total readership is certainly higher). I can't contribute yet to discussions as to the ratio of readers to feedback as I haven't received any fb this week.

Edited to add: My ratio seems to be one actual reader per eight pagehits. Even so, this makes my annual website readership of the order of 2750 people. If it's always the same readers visiting, then this figure is lower; if pagehits spike whenever a new story is put up, then the figure is higher. This doesn't count those who read my fic on popular websites, of course, and I strongly suspect that those readers must considerably outnumber my website visitors (but this suspicion is based on nothing more than my own early fic-reading habits). All these figures compare well to print runs of first novels in Australia, which I understand are usually at the 3000 copy mark.

I wriite fiction because I enjoy it, even though I am apt to moan here about the difficult bits. I wrote for fifteen years without showing anything I wrote to more than a few people; I would hardly have persisted if I didn't find the act of writing satisfying in itself. But it's always gratifying to know that I have readers.

Comments

[rahirah]

This is all rather cool. I signed up for one of the stat monitor thingies, but I'm waiting till I post my next chapter to update my pages with counters. I was always unhealthily fascinated by the stats on ff.net back when it was worthwhile having a paid account there, but of course there you couldn't tell who was a return vistor or anything.

[indri]

This is all rather cool

I particularly enjoy looking through the stats at the end of the day and finding I've had readers from Moscow and Oslo as well as the usual suspect English-speaking countries.

But I also often find myself berating the results when I see someone's turned up, read my worst stories, and moved on. I want to shout, "No! Read the others instead, they're much better!"

[azdak.livejournal.com]

This is fascinating stuff. I had no idea so many people read fanfic (and I love the idea of your Boston reader sighing happily and settling down to a good afternoon's read, having finally found somone who's work she really enjoyed). Seriously, nearly 3000 is a hell of a lot of people, way more than I would have expected, given what a minority activity reading fanfic is. And it is so interesting that you can see where they come from. Now you can plan a marketing strategy which ensures that, fr'instance, the lemur-lovers find something close to what they're looking for. I'm not sure there's anything you can do fro the Spike/Angelus lovers (unless you can persuade someone from that genre to write you a little blurb saying 'It may not be Spangelus, but the writing rocks' to stick above whichever story you think would most appeal to them...

[indri]

Your comment has just prompted me to look up some wider-ranging statistics and I wound up discussing them with my SO. I think the results are so interesting that I'm going to put them in a separate post tonight--thanks.

Now you can plan a marketing strategy which ensures that, fr'instance, the lemur-lovers find something close to what they're looking for.

Er, Spike Goes to Madagascar? Buffy vs the Aye-Aye? Or maybe just a link to the Duke University primate centre :)

I'm not sure there's anything you can do fro the Spike/Angelus lovers (unless you can persuade someone from that genre to write you a little blurb saying 'It may not be Spangelus, but the writing rocks' to stick above whichever story you think would most appeal to them...

Well, you know, both Coquette and peasant_ have written comments like that already, I just haven't asked to quote them. What I may end up doing is rearrange my site a wee bit to make the not-so-good fic less prominent. I could give pairing info, but my work really isn't about the 'ships.

Of course, one thing I could do is write Spangel... but I wouldn't be doing myself any favours by inviting comparison with Pea and Coquette.

[speakr2customrs.livejournal.com]

'Spike goes to Madagascar' would rock. An evil vampire Sifaka, doing that sideways leaping dancing thing! Yay! Preferably Spike accompanied by Giles, so that the accurate classifications can be given. Good opportunity for a starring role by the Fossa, the world's cutest top predator, believed by the locals to have supernatural powers.

I've got links up on my site for some of the odd things people are looking for when they stumble upon me; mainly things that actually play a part in my fics, such as Whitby (setting of my 'Roxyverse' AU fics) and to the BtVS roleplaying game. However no way am I going to link to some of the odd things that have cropped up in search referrals, such as Bullfighting Barbie and copulating dogs.

[indri]

'Spike goes to Madagascar' would rock.

Well, I have the reference works handy. And there's a place in the local botantic gardens that's filled with Madagascan fauna.

A while back I threatened to write fic featuring Spike in a biplane and on a kayak. I'll add "in Madagascar" to the specs then.

An evil vampire Sifaka

Or one of Blavatsky's Lemurians would do nicely.

I've got links up on my site for some of the odd things people are looking for when they stumble upon me; mainly things that actually play a part in my fics, such as Whitby

I'm still worried about that poor visitor from India who was after a painless divorce. And what am I to make of someone looking for "drugged sleeping thumbs"?