#Thank you again to everyone who reblogged the poll and helped boost the data poll :D

[a-gay-bloodmage]

First off, thank you to everyone who voted, and especially to all of those who reblogged and helped this poll reach an even bigger data pool! Over four hundred votes is amazing! I'm sure I'll run another poll like this again one day in the future with more specific choices in order to get an even better lay of the land.

Now, time for some data analysis...

I'll be honest, this was largely a poll conducted to reassure myself that I wasn't going insane. As a lover and writer of Explicit fanfiction, seeing an odd difference between the kudos given to my Explicit fics versus my non-Explicit fics was strange to me. After all, I leave kudos on pretty much every fic I read unless I truly didn't enjoy it. And that includes a lot of Explicit content. Sue me, I'm a pervert on the internet! You probably are, too! As a result, this poll was born to get to the bottom of why I was seeing such a difference in kudos.

Using my own fics as the data pool, as of noon on December 23, 2022, I've done some math. I'm only including my fics written this year in the data. I used two methods of calculation: one being to add up total kudos and total hits and find the percentage of TK/TH. The second method of calculation was to get the individual K/H percentages for each fic, add them up, and then divide by the total number of fics to find an average percentage. If there are any math people in the audience who think there's a better way to calculate, I'm all ears! I wasn't sure which method was the most accurate, so I'm including them both here.

I have written 14 General fics, 10 Teen and 10 Mature fics, and 4 Explicit fics.

Total Kudos over Total Hits:

General: 15.48% Teen: 11.72% Mature: 14.14% Explicit: 07.05%

Individual Kudos over Individual Hits:

General: 21.14% Teen: 14.61% Mature: 14.79% Explicit: 09.35%

As of December 23, 2022, out of my top 15 fics of 2022, 5 were Mature, 4 were General, 3 were Teen, and 3 were Explicit. Two of those Explicit fics were only posted in the last three weeks. One was posted on the twenty-first. This is not a matter of Explicit fics being unpopular. And, since I'm doing averages and percentages, this data isn't skewed toward the older, predominantly non-Explicit having accumulated more hits and kudos. This data tells me, on average, how many people who click on a fic to read it leave kudos at the end.

Since it was a part of the poll, I was curious to see if the amount of kudos that are from Guests aligns somewhat with the amount of people who answered that they only leave kudos on Explicit fic when logged out of their Archive account. I've gone through all of my fics and tallied up the amount of kudos that are the result of guests.

Guest Kudos:

General: 25/141 (17.73%) Teen: 16/86 (18.60%) Mature: 22/100 (22.00%) Explicit: 6/27 (22.22%)

There's certainly less of a difference between the first set of data and the guest kudos ratio, but it's interesting to see that there's still an upward trend as you move from General / Teen to Mature / Explicit.

I'm sure that there's more data analysis that I could do with this, but I think this generally covers my bases. I fully plan on running another survey like this at a later date next year and with, hopefully, another few dozen fics under my belt to add to the data pool of content to analyze. Thank you to everyone who contributed!

Let this be your year-end reminder to go and show writers some love! Especially as the world grows more and more conservative, it's important to let the people who provide porn on the internet know that they're valued. That sounds like a joke, but I'm serious! Producing and consuming "degenerate" content isn't something we should be ashamed of. We're all freaks on the internet! We just don't have to be lonely freaks!