Thanks for the kind words about the blog! So glad you enjoy it. 🙂

I’ve spent a while trying to look at various stats of popularity myself, because I’ve been curious as both an author and a reader about what a typical fic receives, and what a popular fic receives. I think the answer here is unfortunately unclear; there is no one-size-fits-all way to measure popularity. A few observations on my way to trying to answer your question about kudos vs. hits:

You are viewing: What Are Hits On Ao3

TYPICAL NUMBERS OF HITS AND KUDOS ARE SMALL.

Most fanworks on AO3 receive far fewer hits and kudos than in the examples you gave:

As of Nov 2014, half of AO3 fanworks received 12 kudos or fewer. (90% had ~100 kudos or fewer.)

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As of Nov 2014, half of AO3 fanworks received ~400 hits or fewer. (90% had ~2700 hits or fewer.)

TYPICAL NUMBERS OF COMMENTS ARE SMALLER.

You’re right that the number of comments is far smaller – as of Nov 2014, half of AO3 fanworks received one or zero comments. This is probably partly because of intimidation, as you note, but I’ve also learned that both authors and readers turn out to have complicated feelings about giving and receiving comments vs. kudos.

FEEDBACK RATES VARY A LOT BETWEEN FANDOMS.

The typical numbers and ratios of hits, kudos, and comments vary quite substantially between fandoms.

I looked at the average number of hits and kudos for 6 very different fandoms on AO3 (scroll down to fandoms section), and found that both average hit rate and kudos rate varied by as much as 4x depending on the fandom. And not predictably correlated with fandom size in that sample, either. (I also tried to look at kudos/hits, but it’s better to ignore that – my methodology there was not very good.)

I’ve also looked at the amount of comment feedback that 10 popular fandoms get on AO3 vs. FFN, but you can also see how that varies just on AO3. (Scroll down to see it broken down by fandom.)

FEEDBACK RATES VARY A LOT BASED ON OTHER FACTORS.

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The number of hits and kudos a fic gets also varies a lot based on ratings (more), relationship categories, and fic length.

KUDOS/HITS IS NOT A RELIABLE METRIC.

Okay, so all of this gives context for comparing your numbers to those of other fanworks. But part of what you asked is – knowing the number of hits and kudos you’ve gotten, is there a way to make sense of those two numbers together?

Here’s where I must regretfully say, I don’t think so.

There are a lot of reasons that a fanwork may get a bunch of hits without getting a bunch of kudos. I can speak to some of them from personal experience:

• A story (especially a multi-chapter story, posted over a long period of time) can get multiple hits from the same visitor, who can only leave kudos once. AO3 tries to filter out multiple hits when they detect that they’re coming from the same person, which minimizes this problem somewhat. But I bet that some circumstances like a person reading a story from multiple devices or clearing their browser cache between visits (e.g.) will still cause multiple hits. In this case, these hits are all mostly from people who really love your work and are revisiting it because they enjoy it so much.
• I’ve found that when one of my stories gets rec’d by someone, it gets a large influx of visitors (hits), most of whom don’t leave kudos. Maybe they come and read the summary & tags and decide it’s not their thing, which is cool. And/or maybe a lot of people who casually read stories from rec lists are less likely to leave kudos than most of my readers, even if they do enjoy the story. I’m not sure. Either way, having one of my stories rec’d ends up lowering the kudos/hits ratio a bunch, even though I don’t think it means anything bad about my story.
• There are other reasons that hits might get inflated a lot. E.g., it seems like if you have a fanwork with a title that shows up high in a common AO3 search result, you also get a lot of hits, but not many kudos. Several of my fandom stats fanworks posted to AO3 have something like “ship″ or “slash” or “femslash” in the title, and show up near the top of the results if you search for those terms. Which I suspect a lot of people do. Some of those fanworks have A TON of hits – 2-3x as many as my most popular fanfic – but far fewer kudos than most of my stories. I think people are probably clicking on them and realizing it’s not what they’re after. Or else stats are just not something that entices people to leave kudos? I’m not sure.
• On the other side of things, I suspect different fandoms have different customs about how obligatory it is to leave kudos. In some fandoms, especially smaller, closer knit ones, I would bet that a higher ratio of kudos to hits is more usual. But at this stage I only have anecdata to support this, from talking to members of and poking around in such fandoms a bit.

These are just a few examples of how there ends up being a lot of luck and a lot of variance in the ratio of hits to kudos on any given fanwork. Both of these numbers are interesting and somewhat informative, but you can’t really tell too much from the ratio, unfortunately.

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