The Bronycon Effect? · 9:55pm Aug 16th, 2017
Minor musing here, but the daily view-count for all my stories doubled during Bronycon, coinciding with a number of upvotes and faves. Now that Brony-con is over, I jumped onto the stat pages for a number of my largest fics (Rise, Beyond the Borderlands, and Tirek is Doomed) and noted that, yes indeed, average daily views of the fics as much as doubled during that period, though the scaling wasn't uniform across the various fics (for example, some had views almost triple the first day, then wind down over the next two while others had a boost at the start that moved to double by the last day).
Is it meaningful? Well, it's certainly a statistic. It doesn't prove causation, though it's likely enough that Bronycon had something to do with it given the uniform jump in stats across my works so perfectly coinciding across those three days. This isn't something I'd thought to keep track of yearly, and I'd not ever thought to check stats on that until now, so I have no prior results to see if it's consistent across the years. Does make me want to check over the next week and see what the tail-effect is, though.
Anyway, kind of a cool thing to notice. Must have been some word of mouth, or maybe just a surge in fandom-related activity during the Bronycon community. If you were at Bronycon, was my name dropped somewhere?
Oh, speaking of cons, this morning I answered the panel call from 2018s LTUE and put my name in for consideration on a number of panels. It's still quite a ways off, but mark your calendars, because I'll be there once again!
I'm not aware of any name drops, but it was a big convention and one data point isn't nearly enough for that.
Were they high all weekend, or did the new views only kick in on a specific day? That might suggest whether you were name-dropped on one of the writing panels, perhaps.
4637587
Just unusually high for each one, across the weekend. All peaked on different days.
It could just be coincidence.
4637594
Oh yeah! It was also Worldcon weekend. Is it possible there was crossover from your original SFF, or do you keep the pony stuff firewalled?
4637602
Maybe? Honestly, worldcon is pretty small, and my regular site didn't get any unexpected hits. Bronycon seems more likely.
All anyone's talking about recently is Con's, while I've never attended one.