SimonDoom
Kink Lord
- Joined
- Apr 9, 2015
- Posts
- 16,959
Yeah, after about a month the growth rate becomes very steady (except that topmost story, which took about a year to level off, for some reason that I haven't figured out).
Here's a plot of the same data, but by calendar date instead of age. The green curve at the top is the first chapter of my "Stringed Instrument" series, and the lime-green one below it is chapter 2; you can see they get a bit of a bump every time a new chapter appears.
Some of them also made it onto the category toplist, which shows up as a sustained increase in view rate (steeper slope); for example, the light blue curve at about day 1200. This also gives a bit of a boost to earlier chapters, though it's not as obvious.
The dashed-blue-gray curve, which has gained views faster than any of my other stories, is also the lowest scoring. I suspect that's not a coincidence; I wrote a stroke-y blurb for something that wasn't really a stroke-y story, so I got a lot of eyeballs but not the right kind of eyeballs.
Bramblethorn, I think the reason your top story didn't level off for a year is that you kept adding chapters to the series for about 450 days. You can see little steps up in the view curve corresponding to each additional chapter. In addition to that, the first story will indefinitely receive more daily views than every subsequent chapter over the long term, so its slope always will be steeper. The view gap between the first chapter and the second will always increase over time. That's true even when the first chapter is the lowest-rated chapter, as is the case with your Stringed Instrument series and as is the case with both my series.
If you look closely at your chart the rate of increase for the first chapter lessens a little after you finished adding chapters, even though it continues to be higher than subsequent chapters. This is true for my chapter stories as well.
It's interesting that your stand-alone gray-blue dotted line story (I assume this is Counting to Eleven) settled below your Stringed Instrument first chapter, because standalone stories usually get more views over time than chapter stories. In this case the significantly better score of Stringed Instrument may have made the difference to its superior performance over time.