A Pseudo-Statistical* Analysis of Exposure Versus Commitment (Or: What I Did Today Instead of Editing "Harmony") · 7:31am Aug 11th, 2013
Introduction
As many of you are no doubt aware, Qwapdo's story "Hail To The King" has been parked in the feature box long enough to receive a frankly unheard-of amount of attention for a single opening chapter. Out of curiosity about the source of all the hullabaloo, I ended up taking a look at it over the past couple of days, and was... well, for the time being, let's just say "unsurprised" about what I found. In light of how stratospheric this author's rise to renown has been, though, I wasn't done with him just yet. I looked a bit farther into the whole scenario, and found that in the course of amassing 2068 story favorites, 1405 upvotes (in other words, an overall ratio of 82.65 upvotes for every downvote), and 6,034 total views on his story's first chapter, the author himself has garnered--as of the time of me typing this--a total of 135 followers. All of which happened in the course of about four or five days. In the words of the closest thing our generation has to a pop culture visionary: that shit cray.
Beyond the raw numbers, though, something else intrigued me about this guy. 130 followers doesn't seem a lot when you put it next to the counts of guys like Pen Stroke and shortskirtsandexplosions, but on that note, those two guys have a hell of a lot more stories (and story views) to their names than Qwapdo does. In my mind, this naturally begged the question of how Qwapdo's ratio of story views versus followers compared to those of other more well-known authors. And as is the case with most questions that my mind begs, I went a little overboard with my method of figuring that out.
This is that method.
Thesis
I'm gonna mash a bunch of FIMFic site stats together and see what happens.
Materials
• one list of the top 50 most followed users on FIMFiction.Net
• a shitty 2010 plastic MacBook with parts chipping off and an OS that's at least two versions behind
• an unhealthy aversion to doing anything productive today
• boredom
Special Thanks
To Twilightclopple, for not having a fucking author bio module on your userpage, thereby forcing me to go through your entire story list and manually add up each view count.
Procedure
1. Compile follower counts and total story view count for all 50 authors listed as "Most Followed" on the FIMFiction site statistic page.
2. Plug that data into the formula (follower count)/(total story view count/100) to obtain the incredibly creatively/nonsensically-named "heat index" for each listed author.3. Consider the fact that literally no one gives a shit about this.
4. Take a drink.
5. Manually sort authors by total story view count and heat index because I don't know how to make the Google Drive spreadsheet do it for me.
6. Take another drink.
7. ????
8. Most of these authors now probably hate me.
9. Profit.
Graphs N' Shit**
Adjusted Heat Index Rankings (As of About 6 PM EST on 8/10/2013)
1. Kiroberos 3.682
2. Rust 3.524
3. Niaeruzu 3.226
4. Dennis The Menace 3.137
5. Pegasus Rescue Brigade 3.067
6. Loyal2Luna 2.924
7. BlackWing 2.796
8. DarkWing 2.707
9. Hoopy McGee 2.524
10. Pen Stroke 2.353
11. Aegis Shield 2.280
12. AnonponyDASHIE 2.162
13. Crowley 2.161
14. GentlemanJ 2.102
15. Wanderer D 2.074
16. device heretic 2.060
17. Connor Cogwork 2.039
18. Eakin 2.029
19. Andrew Joshua Talon 1.988
20. Chengar Qordath 1.957
21. JasonTheHuman 1.860
22. soundslikeponies 1.842
23. InsertAuthorHere 1.776
24. shortskirtsandexplosions 1.770
25. Cloudy Skies 1.698
26. DawnFade 1.662
27. Kwakerjak 1.642
28. RavensDagger 1.612
29. SleeplessBrony 1.601
30. kits 1.591
31. BronyWriter 1.420
32. Friendly Uncle 1.344
33. Cold in Gardez 1.342
34. Bronystories 1.317
35. Twilightclopple 1.314
36. The Descendant 1.295
37. butterscotchsundae 1.279
38. Bronius Maximus 1.124
39. Anonymous Pegasus 1.114
40. Skywriter 1.113
41. ImJustAnotherBrony 1.077
42. Art Inspired 1.074
43. AbsoluteAnonymous 0.943
44. totallynotabrony 0.913
45. Blueshift 0.838
46. TAW 0.669
47. ROBCakeran 0.540
48. darf 0.534
Group average: 1.815
Data Usage
The idea behind the heat index was that it would be able to show with some degree of accuracy how "hot" any particular author is in the eyes of the general FIMFiction public. The index scales from a baseline measurement of 1.000, which equates to 1 follower for every 100 story views. In other words, for every 100 views received on any published story by an author (here considered to represent 100 unique viewers, for lack of any real way of delineating the influence of repeat viewers), 1 person would be impressed enough by the author's skill, imagination, choice of ship, or what-have-you to click the "Follow" button and thereby add to that author's overall follower count. The more followers an author can accrue per 100 total story views, the higher their heat index will be, which in theory would then indicate how gifted they are at attracting a consistent fanbase and therefore how much "heat" has been generated by the growth of said fanbase. In this way, we can compare exposure (the total number of times an author's work has been viewed) against commitment (the number of people whose viewing of an author's work inspired them to keep track of that author so they can read more work that they create in the future).
This data is, of course, not a comprehensive picture of the entire site, and as such the authors included here may not represent the actual range of the sitewide heat index. However, it's worth nothing that at lower follower counts, a single uncommonly popular story can have a huge and often immediate effect on an author's follower count, as has been the case with Qwapdo recently. Aside from being readily available and easily obtained, the data from the Most Followed list also represents well-established and long-standing accounts that, for better or worse, can be taken as solid indicators of how follower count and heat index trends develop over an extended period of time. Given the high number of story views and followers attached to these accounts, it's far less likely that the data will have been dramatically skewed by any one event. As the footnotes explain, though, a few outliers did occur anyway, and were eliminated from the data shown in this study/AP Chem flashback/pretentious scientific bullshit.
Analysis (a.k.a. Presumably Why You Put Up With All The Other Stuff I Shoved In Before This)
Of all the questions and concerns this data ushers into view, perhaps the most burning and pertinent of them all is this: who in the blueberry fuck is Kiroberos, and why am I calling him the single hottest author on the entire damn website?
Well, as I've since discovered in the process of compiling this post, Kiroberos is the author of a first-person Human-In-Equestria story called Memory Pending, as well as two spinoffs set within the same universe. All told, he has amassed 32,331 views on his three published stories and 1190 followers, which gives him a heat index score of 3.682, the highest of all 48 of the authors examined in this study. In the context of this user, the phrase "hottest author on the site" seems to be a misnomer. Kiroberos is not as famous as Pen Stroke (10th on the adjusted list with a heat index score of 2.353) nor as infamous as device heretic (16th on the adjusted list with a heat index score of 2.060, and yeah, "infamous" is totally the right word to use here and we all pretty much know it), and Herman Melville on Adderall couldn't match the sheer word count of the shortskirtsandexplosions anthology (24th on the adjusted list with a heat index score of 1.770), let alone this guy. So what does this result mean for somebody like Kiroberos? And what does mean for his runner-ups Rust, Niaeruzu, Dennis the Menace, and Pegasus Rescue Brigade, all of whom scored above 3.000 on the heat index scale and only one of whom is even in the top twenty of the Most Followed list?
Well, okay, it's not quite that bad.
The heat index doesn't show precisely how skilled an author is at writing, or even necessarily how popular they are. What it does show is something that's difficult to quantify elsewhere: how skilled they are at building, maintaining, and satisfying a consistent audience. Kiroberos has the highest heat index out of all the authors on the Most Followed list because he has the highest number of followers relative to his total story view count. In essence, the heat index measures who can do more with less, so according to that scale, Kiroberos has done the most with the least. Remember, this index cannot determine whether Kiroberos is a good writer or not, so it's still up to your own individual opinion whether or not he deserves his acclaim. All this index shows is that whatever Kiroberos has done with his particular combination of stories has created a higher ratio of individual readers willing to follow him than anyone else measured in this study.
With this in mind, we can extrapolate several interesting patterns from the heat index data. For example, out of the top 25 most followed authors on FIMFiction, only four ranked within the top 10 in heat index: Pen Stroke (1st in followers, 10th in heat index), Dennis The Menace (13th in followers, 4th in heat index), Rust (21st in followers, 2nd in heat index), and Hoopy McGee (23rd in followers, 9th in heat index). Given that two of those four authors lie outside the top 20 on the Most Followed List, the implication is that being higher up on the follower list makes it more difficult to maintain a steady ratio of story views to new followers, thus resulting in a lower heat index score. To some degree, this is almost a foregone conclusion: given that there are only around 100,000 registered accounts on FIMFiction, it stands to reason that many authors with large follower counts have saturated their market, in the sense that there are relatively few new followers to be found among people who have not yet read any of their stories and passed judgement on their skill as an author. On the other hand, the lack of fluctuation by Pen Stroke and Aegis Shield (3rd in followers, 11th in heat index) across the board in followers, total story view counts, and heat index score seem to run contrary to this purported trend. Follow-up studies may be warranted on average view count per story relative to follower count, or story favorites relative to total views on individual stories. (Author's note: if it actually looks like I'm going to do this, please wrap my charger cord around my neck and pull on it until I stop kicking.)
Switching our focus over to total story view count initially appears to merely support what we've already determined with regard to total viewership negatively affecting heat index score. However, a couple extraneous details in this section of the data paint a very intriguing portrait of the FIMFiction reader base, one that contradicts a lot of what we might assume about it without looking at things from this perspective. The three authors on the site with the highest total story view counts are darf with 432,231 total views, ROBCakeran53 with 400,569 total views, and TAW with 353,177. The next two closest authors are Anonymous Pegasus and Blueshift with 212,490 total views and 185,497 views, respectively, and given that ROBCakeran53's claim to fame is the inimitable*** tale of a small rainbow horse in a cardboard box, his might not be the best case to hold up the validity of the heat score method. So essentially, that leaves us with two clopfic authors with immensely larger view counts than any other author in the fandom, and My Little Dashie. Not exactly the most flattering portrayal of our little fan fiction community, right?
Right. Until you look at the heat index scores.
Those same authors with the three highest total story view counts in turn have the three lowest heat index scores: 0.669 for TAW, 0.540 for ROBCakeran53, and 0.534 for darf. As I said before, at first glance this makes perfect sense given the aforementioned point about market saturation. Again, though, consider Pen Stroke: even though darf has nearly 2.5 times as many story views, Pen Stroke has almost double the number of followers. The top 5 most followed authors on the site all have fewer than 190,000 total story views, barely half of what TAW has garnered at the #7 spot. In fact, out of the 11 authors in the top 50 most followed list that can be positively identified as being primarily clopfic writers****, 9 of them occupied the bottom 20 spots in the heat index rankings compiled for this study. Despite their substantial dominance in total view counts, it appears that clopfic writers can't keep up in terms of relative follower counts. In other words, writing porn gets you hits, but it doesn't seem to create a consistent and loyal fanbase around a particular author at the same rate as non-explicit fan fiction.
Aside from invalidating what darf would probably like to believe, this conclusion also challenges some of what we and the world at large tends to think of fan fiction in general, particularly those who are fans of MLP:FiM. The stereotype of the sex-obsessed, neckbearded brony would indicate that many people create accounts on this site purely for the sake of viewing pornography, and this data does not necessarily disprove that. However, it does indicate that said "obsession" with technicolor horse sex does not extend to the authors who provide it. This collective unwillingness to follow clopfic authors as opposed to primarily non-explicit authors speaks to what I'll call, for lack of a better term, a general lack of standards among the audience for sexually explicit fan fiction. Certainly, a fair number of people follow darf because of a perceived uncommon quality to his work, but if his heat index score is anything to go by, a great number more read his stories purely because they're clop, and couldn't care less who wrote them or how well they did so. In layman's terms, if your plan to make it into the feature box is to write "Pony Verbs a Noun: The Refuckening", don't expect any of the rapturous acclaim in the comments to be directed at you personally for writing it.
Conclusion
Publishing in any form is a tricky business, and achieving success with any consistency is based in equal parts of the whims of your rapidly shifting audience and pure dumb luck. What I've put together here isn't close to a complete analysis of what the heat index could tell us about what makes the average MLP fanfic reader tick, but as far as my ego's concerned, it's a damn good place to start. Should the urge strike me, I may take another look at this data sometime and delve more intimately into other genres of story besides clop. I may also look more specifically at individual top 50 authors to determine the origins of their heat scores, as well as other authors outside that list with interesting scores of their own (FYI: my boy Chromosome's rocking a 2.804 at the moment). In any case, if you'd like to do any of that or something else entirely with this data, be my guest. I don't know if this'll end up helping someone figure this place out or just be a cool thing to look at for a few minutes, but regardless I (somehow) enjoyed putting it all together. Hopefully, it didn't suck too bad to read through either.
And that's all I have to say about that.
(Also, in case you were wondering, Qwapdo's current heat index score is 2.237. Pretty fly for a new guy.)
(holy Christ my head hurts)
*I call it "pseudo-statistical" because no actual statistical analysis was ever involved in any of this. It just makes me sound smarter when I phrase it like that.
**Due to the unique circumstances of their popularity, the heat indexes of knighty and kkat (#16 and #50 on the Most Followed List) were considered to be outliers and therefore not included in these graphs. We're professionals here, y'know.
***That was a joke.
****though an intensive and thoroughly objective process that consisted of me flipping through their story page and hitting Command-F for the word "Mature"
Wow....this has got to be, without a doubt, the single most impressive feat of procrastination I have ever held whitness to in my life. You have somehow managedto procrastinate, by doing ACTUAL WORK! This must break multiple laws of the universe. I congradgulate you good sir. Also, this was enlightening, and an impressive feat to boot. Good job. Now go have a drink, because I'm assuming you need one after all this
This is pretty neat. You should do more statistical analysis bullshit like this.
1276897 hear hear.
kinda like taking a break from taking a break, but whit actual work instead of 'breaks'
i wonder if this specifical heat index could be used to highlight writter, or somehow add into what gets on the feature box...
i'll admit i dont follow any clop writter and weirdly give feedback of any kind to them, most of that stuff are most often than not, cheap fun and nothing else.
(the most prominent exeptions i can remenber are RagingSemi humanized fics...)
though long and whit far too many numbers for my likes, i found this an enjoayble read and look into the numbers going on behind stage. i for one say thanks for sharing.
i also now imagine some clop writters saying "everything i know is wrong!"
1276911 Wouldn't he need more stats to look at, then? :D
Intriguing set of data here... I think it'd be more intriguing if you could have a second set of data featuring total story views rather than total story views of a single chapter, as at the moment this quite remarkable set of calculations is skewed heavily towards one-shots, but with the caveat that adding this metric would skew towards those who write longer stories.
I guess such a thing would be the long-tail heatmap? Interesting in its own right. Surprisingly, I score a 0.97, slightly above Blueshift and right smack dab on the "average" scale of things.
To be honest, I'm not sure why I'm surprised from the conclusions about porn vs. not porn stories. A story used for the sole purpose of getting someone off is a one-time investment, a temporary pleasure that can be just as easily replaced with a new story for the next time. To this date, I've only heard of Love.Sick and Romance Reports as re-readable stories with sexually mature content.
Conversely, a non-porn story that isn't a one-shot is a definite long-term investment, so it would make sense to follow the author. I followed you, after all, to get to know when the next chapter of Harmony would be out, and do pretty much the same for any other author who catches my attention.
So, like, yeah, that was really cool. If my statistics class had been like this, maybe I would have gotten an A.
Awww man, screw kkat and their masturbatory posting of FO:E. They knocked me off the top 50 list. Would have liked to see my heat index number!
edit: no idea why that posted the comment twice... deleting the second.
Given your formula: 111(my total followers)/[10765/100](my total story views)
I have an "Heat Index" of 1.031, which right around Art Inspired and AA. Doesn't mean anything but I'm happy with that.
Interesting note : TAW makes your list, but hasn't posted in almost a year, or even so much as logged into the site in six months.
Bad Horse will have the largest boner alive when he sees this.
Interesting write-up. It's always fun to see how the mind of the average FiM ficer works through sheer scale of numbers.
Oh man, that was great.
Until I calc'd my own heat score and found it was under 1. D: Thanks for destroying my ego.
Nothing gets me up and running in the morning like 2500 words of math. Nice going. (And for the record and all intents and purposes, you and I are hovering nicely at 1.799 and 1.830 respectively)
Are pseudo-statistics really not safe for work?
I'm not going to pretend I fully grasp everything behind this (I probably still wouldn't even if it were before midnight over here), so there is only one thing a can take away: Fuck yeah 2.438. More than Penstroke.
Now that I've seen this, I'm surprised I haven't done something like this.
1277043 No comment.
Welcome to the math side of the Force.
GhostOfHeraclitus has a heat score of 3.07. The verbose opinionated bastard. Though I wouldn't call it a heat score, as heat usually means "hot, trending". This is averaged over all time.
Watches per story is definitely highest on the first few stories. I think it's also high when something is hot. I think readers like a story much better when they think that other readers like it. I've noticed that many of my stories get most of their down-votes within the first 10 votes. One of my stories got plastered with down-votes in the first 10 votes, and it's stayed at about equal up-votes and down-votes since, even though it's not a bad story.
I've gotten a lot of followers for my blog. I have over 100 blog posts, and they'd add another 10-20,000 views to my total views (driving my score below 1
).
I think story views (first-chapter views) is better than chapter views, because you're trying to capture how many people tried an author out & were impressed enough to follow. Using total chapter views treats different kinds of behaviors the same way.
There's also the EqD and spacebattles factors. EqD readers don't follow as much, probably because a lot of them don't have accounts. A bunch of guys use spacebattles.com as an alternate interface to fimfiction. They hang out there, make comments and fimfic story recommendations deep within giant, multithousand word threads, and never create a fimfiction account.
My guess is that followers wouldn't scale linearly with story views in any case. Seems like a lot of the people with many followers wrote one famous big story that earned them most of their followers.
If there's some statistic you want, ask & I might have it. I've got a pretty extensive database of fimfiction numbers that I gathered off the site last year, covering the first 40,000 stories.
So was Hail to the King any good?
Hee! I managed a 1.299 heat index despite my notable works all being clopfic without exception
Thank goodness, seeing as I gave a Bronycon panel/lecture on pretty much exactly this: being able to hook readers and keep them coming back for the next chapter/book/etc.
Seems like this is a 'what happens NEXT?' index, which makes no allowances for type of work. You can have guys like BlackWing who put out a very recognizable blend of ponefic, and though some folks might not want to read hundreds of thousands of words of it, there are plenty who do and he's fantastic at telegraphing that message, 'tune in for more of this!'. That's got huge value.
You might even say this is a commercial potential (as a working writer continuing to write) measurement in that it ignores haters and the uninterested to measure how well you can latch on to your personal audience. Nothing is more valuable as a working writer or artist than that: haters/critics are totally irrelevant commercially. Led Zeppelin had all the critic haters in the world, but commercially…
Holy shit, this read.
I actually like numbers, despite how often they fail to work for me. What you did here was something intriguing to say the least, but I'm finding myself having a hard time to comment on it. Whenever you feel the need to procrastinate productively(!) again, I wouldn't mind seeing you over-analyze this data again in a different light.
Man. I should publish something.
Hmm. Followers per hectoview, right? That puts me at 116/108.47 or... 1.0694, if I stick to five signficant figures.
I'm hotter than AbsoluteAnonymous. If that doesn't prove this system is busted, nothing does.
1277136 I'd be interested to see some number crunching from you and god only know what could happen if you and Aquaman collaborated.
Interesting stuff Aqua, if you ever feel like procrastinating in such a fashion again I can safely say I'd love to heard about it.
My heat index score is .48, even worse than Darf. I'm not surprised to find that I don't have a consistent audience, since I've done things of just about every genre.
I guess it's all in how you present things. If you'd switched the numerator with the denominator, it would have been a measure of how broadly an author's stories are viewed outside of their normal followership.
I'm gonna go ahead and say that the shitty heat rating for clop is because of hits from Equestria After Dark.
I would like, though I don't know if it's possible, to see the average follow/view count generated by an EQD feature post. See, this gives you the eyes of people who do not have Fimfiction accounts and are not likely to make a new one just for this story.
And getting onto EQAD takes nothing. Those people who read clop and do not give a shit about who wrote it, many of them probably come from EQAD, don't have accounts, and are thus even less likely to hit follow.
Source: I can claim three EQD posts and many more EQAD posts.
>not using the original Back to the Future scene.
What a fuck.
Oh and I guess the post is kinda cool. I ran the numbers and found my index score to be 1.3. I think that's good.
1276938
I dunno, Mids. I almost exclusively write oneshots, and my heat index is slightly below yours at .89. I think a lot of people follow folks with multi-part stories they're interested in to hear about blogs with updates to the story and such; that seemed to be my experience when I wrote my only multi-chapter story.
Also, Aqua, you need a hobby.
1277487
You act like I didn't try desperately to find it first.
For once, both Youtube and a Google GIF search completely failed me.
Wow. 5th place on the heat index chart.
Considering I've only got 6 fics I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
That was an impressive feat of mathematical analysis, Akwa! Now... go write Harmony!
1.295
Thank you for providing definitive proof of my long-held fear that I'm an average writer who has only gotten where I am by bludgeoning the fandom to death with twenty-seven stories. I'm going to go lay in my yard.
Whoa.
This is shocking, to say the least. I'm very happy that my stories are doing as well as they are of course. That I can really entertain this many is a very good feeling. 
That said, very interesting system you have here.
Oh, and it's not actually a human in Equestria story.
So Kkat has a heat index score of 60.69 using these parameters, and knighty has a score of 176.8.
...I can see why you didn't include them.
1277536
This is a big reason why I know the heat index score doesn't accurately indicate quality of product. The fact that I've got a higher score than you, Cold in Gardez, and Skywriter is pretty clear evidence that somethin' ain't right.
1277557
You know, I wasn't entirely sure about that when I wrote it, but I saw it was in the HiE group and hadn't ever personally read it, so I kind of jumped to conclusions. It's also worth noting that it was like 2 AM when I wrote most of the analysis.
I would say the only modifier to this should be story views vs number of stories. Because many authors write several unpopular stories until they get one featured, and many like SS&E write a lot but only have a few that are really popular.
Also, I blame the lack of followers for clop authors to be not due to the ability to keep an audience, but rather the fact their audience can't stay awake long enough to click follow due to the afterglow.
1277589
Tis fine. Heh. Still, a very interesting analysis on the clop aspect.
Figured.
1) Some uses break the "heat score" by having followers with no story views (see for example amacita who has 43 followers and no story views).
2) As others have pointed out, the number of followers likely does not scale linearly with the number of views. Although a linear scaling might apply for the majority of users on the site, I would not expect this to be so for the most viewed/followed authors. For example, consider someone who write the perfect story and everyone who reads it follows the author (giving a perfect "heat score" of 100). The author then publishes another story, which everyone on the site reads and enjoys, but gains the author no new followers. Despite being of the same quality, the second story would halve the author's "heat score."
I would think one could come up with a better metric that accounts for this "saturation" that occurs as an author gains followers. I would think that across authors, the curve of followers vs story views would resemble a function like followers ~ log(views) or followers ~ views ^ p (where 0<p<1), so a better metric might be followers/log(views) or followers/views^p. It certainly would be interesting to see across the site how the number of followers an author has correlates with the number of story views.
1276897
If this is procrastination, I'd be very interested in seeing what constitutes as "goofing off".
All in all, an interesting blog post. Also, it would appear step 3 in your procedure is false, as many people have expressed an interest in your data collection!
Really though, it's cool. Data collection is awesome, and bar graphs make it even more awesome.
I promise, I'm only a little bit butthurt over the implication that I'm a clop author and therefore I wouldn't have any views if readers had standards.
And only a little butthurt that my heat score is beyond low and well into the range of "shameful," further reinforcing the idea that none of my many readers came away with the impression that I'm a good writer.
... I'm more sad than anything else.
Huh, I'm in there, gnarly.
As to your conclusions... surprisingly sound. And I usually have an aversion to this type of statistic (that's an outright lie, stats make me happy and sad at the same time). Now, could you tell us exactly what sort of story we must pen to get more followers?
Well, nothing really new here. I have known about this for a while, though seeing it proven is much more gratifying.
Good work on this!
an interesting study, however I'm not certain that total story count is the way to go, followers are more likely to read a story to the finish, so for very long stories ( *cough* *cough* background pony) by the final chapters you are just counting the same people who have already liked/followed over and over and hence giving a lower heat count.
This is neat. I remember hearing back in uni that the higher concern for vehicle makers wasn't "how many people buy this car", but "how many people will buy the next car after owning this car". I think I read somewhere too that, when analyzing MMOs, it was more significant that WoW had something like a 65% retention rate (65% of purchasers still playing it six months (or whatever) after purchase) than that it had such high subscriber numbers. Anyone who wants their next product to be well received (i.e., everyone who makes more than one of something) should be aware of numbers and ratios like these. This was a great read, thanks for putting it together.
Hey, that's pretty cool! I wonder if now that I'm back and writing the heat score will be affected in a significant way?
1277568
To be fair, Knighty and are are complete outliers for purposes of this calculation -- our numbers have no real bearing on what Aquaman is attempting to answer. Knighty runs the site and has followers out of support and people looking to keep abreast of site updates and news. My story has been around for years before coming here, so the number of readers noted by FIMfiction is a relatively minute fraction of the story's actual readers, and my followers numbers are equally non-representative. The "heat index" in both our cases would be useless as a point of comparison.
Granted, other authors on the list suffer similar discrepancies. (Pen Stroke in particular has far more story reads, and far greater popularity, than his FIMfiction numbers will relate. Likewise, anyone who is/was on the FIMfiction staff, as well as anyone from the EQD prereaders group, likely has a fair portion of their followers for reasons unrelated to the quality or popularity of their stories.) The heat index is a fascinating and fun bit of numbers crunching, but shouldn't be given too much weight.
1276984
Sorry for taking your spot.
If you want to understand why this has happened, you can see the discussion here. The final decision to put the story on FIMfiction was motivated by both these responses and an issue with Google.docs which was preventing people from being able to read some of the story chapters on EQD.
Memory Pending and Forgiveness Pending are not HiE. Also, Censorship Pending is just the same story as Forgiveness, just without the more mature stuff cut out.
1280550 Oh, I know it's totally fair, I just thought it was funny how insanely huge yours and knighty's heat index score was. I was curious as to how different your score could be for Aquaman to exclude you entirely (especially since Pen Stroke is in a similar situation to you, and seems to have a normal score) and...well, I got my answer.
Clap! Clap! Clap! Wow just wow.
Nice read. Not that I'm complaining, as I've never seen or used a heat index ranking here, but it seems like just another broken statistic tool at this point.
...Not that statistics are truly representative of writing quality, though, which I'd hold to be more important than view count or follower count or any quantification like that.
1276984
Your heat index is 1.812, which puts you at 23rd on the list.
1282202
Ooh thanks! Higher than expected, neat
So if... follower count = 194 and total story view count = 3,872
It would be (194)/(3,872/100) = 5.01
This formula can't be right... right?
What I find most interesting in all of this, is I'm Kiroberos's Pre-reader. Other than that, I'm just some unpopular nobody.
I have 0 story views and 3 followers, so I have a story count of infinity.