Random Observations About Kudos/hits Ratios On Ao3

random observations about kudos/hits ratios on ao3

so i've been reading fic on ao3 since uhhhh about 2016? 2015 maybe? and writing since 2018 ish. during those years i've made a few observations about common ao3 reader/author behaviors. i thought i'd share them with the obvious caveat that i am limited to the fandoms i've been in and my own personal experiences

One-Shots

generally the standard for one-shots is a 1/10 kudos/hit ratio. meaning if a fic has 3,000 hits, it has at least 300 kudos.

if a fic has a kudos/hit ratio below 10%, it probably has an unsatisfying ending. i almost never see the ratio lowered for poor writing quality.

the exception is fics tagged Unhappy Ending or Hurt No Comfort. those get less hits but the people reading know what they're getting in to. those fics will generally stay within a 10% range.

generally fluff one-shots or fics that are all comfort, no hurt have the highest ratios of any category of fics, sometimes reaching as high as 20%.

Multi-Chaptered Fics

these fics are damn lucky if they reach 10% lmaooo

this is a gradient of sorts, though. complete fics with 2/3 chapters have a much higher chance of being near a 1/10 kudos/hit ratio, while those decade-long 400k 50 chaptered epics are probably near 1%.

based on how ao3 hits work, i would guess that this is because there's a higher chance of ao3 registering another hit even if the reader is just reading the latest updates.

basically, a 2-chapter fic started and finished within two weeks has a very good chance of being above the 10% ratio. that really long fic you spent a week reading three years ago which made you feel like you just ran a marathon? not a chance.

a brief tangent into chapter lengths: a higher length correlates with higher quality. i want to emphasize (actually, i want to tell twelve-year-old self this, but 12 y/o me is beyond our help now) that quantity does NOT make quality. just because you can squeeze an extra thousand words into chapter 3 doesn't make the story any better. however, in general, the writing quality of a 30k fic with 3 chapters will be higher than that of a 30k fic with 30 chapters.

there are exceptions! i once read a very long fic with very long chapters where the writing was, for lack of a better descriptor, extremely childish. the author mostly rotated the same ten verbs around and around for 100k. also sometimes you read a 400-word one-shot that mentally destroys you for weeks.

of course, at the end of the day none of this matters. i wrote a barely decent 42k 5-chapter fic which is somehow over the 10% ratio. i cannot for the life of me understand why this is. it's not good, you guys. it's really not. on the other hand, i wrote a 37k one-shot which is below the 10% ratio. the kudos/hit ratio has not changed how i view the quality of those fics, it just convinced me that some of y'all have no taste.

these really are just random observations i've made from my six ish years putting fic on the good old Archive. it's not meant to be a reading guide, just something that makes you go "huh."

Tags

ao3 random observations