Successful Story Hours - a simple analysis (raised from the thread)

der_kluge

der_kluge

Adventurer
Was curious to see how good my story hour was doing (not so great, was the conclusion). So, I decided to take the number of views and divide it by the number of posts for all the story hours on the first page, and the first half of the second page (everything updated within the last two days).

Here are the results:

Code: 
Piratecat	983	432055	439.5269583
Sepulchrave II	121	6964	57.55371901
Cheiromancer	95	4957	52.17894737
Destan		396	16977	42.87121212
BLACKDIRGE	157	6550	41.71974522
(contact)	588	19877	33.80442177
Old Drew Id	274	7702	28.10948905
Lazybones	242	6560	27.10743802
Capellan	267	6975	26.12359551
barsoomcore*	21	512	24.38095238
Wraithdrit	153	3307	21.61437908
Broccli_Head	99	2071	20.91919192
KDLadage	19	377	19.84210526
Carnifex	421	7586	18.01900238
JollyDoc	506	8975	17.73715415
barsoomcore	85	1506	17.71764706
Old One		636	10794	16.97169811
Dirigible	19	314	16.52631579
Broccli_Head	93	1446	15.5483871
Lars Frehse	499	7384	14.79759519
Krug		4	59	14.75
Nail		223	3185	14.28251121
Silver Moon	34	485	14.26470588
the Jester	154	2146	13.93506494
Shadowdancer	22	282	12.81818182
Rel		44	530	12.04545455
Softwind	25	289	11.56
Amaroq		4	46	11.5
johnsemlak	4	45	11.25
brujahbunny	32	356	11.125
Jon Potter	128	1291	10.0859375
die_kluge	39	363	9.307692308
Hairy Minotaur	138	1218	8.826086957
Wicht		25	202	8.08
Renfield	14	107	7.642857143

I think I have a long ways to go to beat Piratecat. *sigh*

*features the words "wild stewardess" in the title.
 
Last edited by a moderator:

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Hey, don't knock my marketing savvy. It works for the, uh, well... the porn industry.

Oh, never mind.

And don't think for a second that I inflate my view count by endlessly clicking on the links to my own Story Hours.

Uh huh.

Not me.

No sir.
 


I wouldn't sweat it to much. A brief glance at my Story Hour (link below) might be instructive. I think I posted close to a dozen updates before I even got some reader feedback. The key is to simply be persistent and (sooner or later) they will come.

I remember being really excited when my views hit 2,000 but they far exceeded my expectations in the end.

If you have players who log on and comment on your SH themselves, this certainly can increase reader interest.

P.S. My post/view ratio is 20.97. Sweet, that puts me in the top 1/3rd.
 



The interesting thing about this scoring method, whatever its faults might be, is that long-established stories don't necessarily have an advantage over the newcomers...

Of course, it would be more accurate if you only counted the posts that were story updates from the author... As it is, my score would go down precipitiously if my players started posting comments. Of course, switching to this method would be more complicated than its worth since you would have to manually go into each story hour and count the author/update posts.
 


I have had several story hour threads, and it seems my numbers increased with each thread, until the most recent.

"Out of the Frying Pan" (Book I: Gathering Wood) has a score of 26.5 (but shouldn't count as it is a "reprise" and many of those who read it the first time probably did not read it the second time it was posted.

"Out of the Frying Pan" (Book II: Catching the Spark) - Part One has a score of 28.2

"Out of the Frying Pan" (Book II: Catching the Spark) - Part Two has a whopping score of 29.6 (which puts it at #7 on the list!

The Fearless Manticore Killers & The Necropolis of Doom, which is the most recent and falls between Books 2 & 3 in the chronology only has a score of 20.5, however.

The biggest difference is the first 3 were updated about twice a week. The last one has been updated about onec every month or two, so I fear a bunch of people have lost interest.
 

Let's see, my story hour (long-un-updated) has 254 posts and 4,192 views, for a 16.5 average...

BTW, PC's numbers in this will be skewed as he prunes excess posts from his thread. It's quite likely over 4,000 posts have been made in that thread.

Also, what I've noticed is that over the past year, the readership of the story hours has gone up immensely. When I was actively updating my SH, I was in the top ten in views all-time. Now, I'm on the third page.
 

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