SF-O powered?!

[Kit-Karamak]

OKAY!  So... uh... who did it? xD

WHO stole the cookies from the cookie jar? Oh, no, wait... that's more of a Sly Cooper intro joke... uh, let me try another one... wait; I got nothing. 

SO, uh... I've been wracking my BRAIN here trying to figure something out, and I've weighed out all the facts and all the variables and, because of my astounding ability to figure things out based on removing all other variables... okay wait.  I'm rambling, let me start over. 

OKAY... WHO DID IT?!  heh... To be blunt, I've been writing on Fan Fiction for a LONG time, guys.  About a year and a half ago, FanFiction.net began to keep detailed statistics on who was reading what chapter and where they were from.  One reader is an IP address logged, per story.  SO if John Doe reads three stories, each story registers him as a visitor to that story, who read "X" amount of chapters.  He might read 10 chapters of story A, 5 chapters of story B, and 6 chapters of story C.  So... it shows that there was 3 visitors and 21 hits / views combined. 

With me so far?  NOW... I write a lot.  I'm a writing whore.  I have 2.5 million words archived in FF.net because I just... I like to write a lot.  I only write about Sly Cooper, Star Fox and Castlevania. 

Now... EVER SINCE FanFiction.net started keeping track of those two things, so we could separate hits from visitors... (in order to get a more accurate count of fanbase), I started watching my stats. 

Consecutively, every month since they started, including December of 2009, I had between 1098 and 1221.  That's lowest and highest.  99% of the time it's in the mid 1100's for "visitor" stats.  Visitor stats are based on IP address.  Typically that generates anywhere between 1900 and 2800 Views / Hits.  Not bad, not great, but I'm happy with it, because Star Fox, Sly Cooper and Castlevania aren't as popular as, say, Harry Potter, Pokemon or Inuyasha fan fictions... OKAY! 

WITH THAT OUT OF THE WAY here is my CONUNDRUM!  MAYBBEE YOU GUYS CAN HELP ME FIGURE THIS OUT! 

Last month (January 2010), I jumped up to 6100 hits / views from 2200 visitors.  HOLY SMOKES!  HOLY... SMOKE GRENADES! 

I sat down last night and went through every month, every story and tried to figure out WHAT was causing this so that I could figure out what I was doing RIGHT... in order to emulate it.  I mean... I would understand a graduale climb in fanbase or whatnot... but to DOUBLE my visitors and TRIPLE my hits / views... in a single MONTH?!  WHAT DID I DO?! 

Well... I looked at how many times I updated something.  I looked at how many stories I had in update-rotation... I compared it to other months.  It's all the same on average!  I keep 2 to 3 stories in update status in a month most of the time, and once in a while it's just one or two. 

But the differences in those months were by just a few extra people.  If I did 1 story for the whole month... it might be a lower count but the next month I do two or three story updates (not posting chapters, I'm consistant with that ANYhow, I mean... I'd be updating three DIFFERENT stories in a month, compared to just one)... And it'd be the difference of, say... 100 visitors, and 300-400 hits / views. 

HOW IN THE SAM-HECK did I make last month so much DIFFERENT?! 

THEN IT HIT ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!ahem. 

I signed up for SF-O.  I started posting.  I've not been involved with Star Fox forums since, like, 2003. 

IT IS THE ONLY VARIABLE THAT IS DIFFERENT OVER THE LAST YEAR AND A HALF of FF.net's new style of record keeping.

SO I BEG TO QUESTION... Is SF-O directly responsible to this amazing, awesome and completely unexpected jump in my stats?!  And if so... THANK YOU GUYS!  I think I almost peed my pants.  SO is this the POWER of Advertisement from a single Forum board?! 

I cast-eth my soul upon the SF-O Alter, for thou art not worthy of SF-O's benevolence and kindness! ahem.

Archaic speak vexes mineself - more on that anon. 

BUT WOW... Okay, I'm not very good at staying focused without rambling... and I did... so let me just get back to being blunt. 

SFO posting is the only thing I've started doing differently in recent times... and suddenly I notice a spike in my FF stats... I'm sure it has SOMETHING to do with you guys and SO I just wanted to say... THANK YOU!  Even if it wasn't ALL SFO posters, I still appreciate it.   

[Tiberius]

... What?

[Guest FoXXX]

OKAY!  So... uh... who did it? xD

WHO stole the cookies from the cookie jar? Oh, no, wait... that's more of a Sly Cooper intro joke... uh, let me try another one... wait; I got nothing. 

SO, uh... I've been wracking my BRAIN here trying to figure something out, and I've weighed out all the facts and all the variables and, because of my astounding ability to figure things out based on removing all other variables... okay wait.  I'm rambling, let me start over. 

OKAY... WHO DID IT?!  heh... To be blunt, I've been writing on Fan Fiction for a LONG time, guys.  About a year and a half ago, FanFiction.net began to keep detailed statistics on who was reading what chapter and where they were from.  One reader is an IP address logged, per story.  SO if John Doe reads three stories, each story registers him as a visitor to that story, who read "X" amount of chapters.  He might read 10 chapters of story A, 5 chapters of story B, and 6 chapters of story C.  So... it shows that there was 3 visitors and 21 hits / views combined. 

With me so far?  NOW... I write a lot.  I'm a writing whore.  I have 2.5 million words archived in FF.net because I just... I like to write a lot.  I only write about Sly Cooper, Star Fox and Castlevania. 

Now... EVER SINCE FanFiction.net started keeping track of those two things, so we could separate hits from visitors... (in order to get a more accurate count of fanbase), I started watching my stats. 

Consecutively, every month since they started, including December of 2009, I had between 1098 and 1221.  That's lowest and highest.  99% of the time it's in the mid 1100's for "visitor" stats.  Visitor stats are based on IP address.  Typically that generates anywhere between 1900 and 2800 Views / Hits.  Not bad, not great, but I'm happy with it, because Star Fox, Sly Cooper and Castlevania aren't as popular as, say, Harry Potter, Pokemon or Inuyasha fan fictions... OKAY! 

WITH THAT OUT OF THE WAY here is my CONUNDRUM!  MAYBBEE YOU GUYS CAN HELP ME FIGURE THIS OUT! 

Last month (January 2010), I jumped up to 6100 hits / views from 2200 visitors.  HOLY SMOKES!  HOLY... SMOKE GRENADES! 

I sat down last night and went through every month, every story and tried to figure out WHAT was causing this so that I could figure out what I was doing RIGHT... in order to emulate it.  I mean... I would understand a graduale climb in fanbase or whatnot... but to DOUBLE my visitors and TRIPLE my hits / views... in a single MONTH?!  WHAT DID I DO?! 

Well... I looked at how many times I updated something.  I looked at how many stories I had in update-rotation... I compared it to other months.  It's all the same on average!  I keep 2 to 3 stories in update status in a month most of the time, and once in a while it's just one or two. 

But the differences in those months were by just a few extra people.  If I did 1 story for the whole month... it might be a lower count but the next month I do two or three story updates (not posting chapters, I'm consistant with that ANYhow, I mean... I'd be updating three DIFFERENT stories in a month, compared to just one)... And it'd be the difference of, say... 100 visitors, and 300-400 hits / views. 

HOW IN THE SAM-HECK did I make last month so much DIFFERENT?! 

THEN IT HIT ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!ahem. 

I signed up for SF-O.  I started posting.  I've not been involved with Star Fox forums since, like, 2003. 

IT IS THE ONLY VARIABLE THAT IS DIFFERENT OVER THE LAST YEAR AND A HALF of FF.net's new style of record keeping.

SO I BEG TO QUESTION... Is SF-O directly responsible to this amazing, awesome and completely unexpected jump in my stats?!  And if so... THANK YOU GUYS!  I think I almost peed my pants.  SO is this the POWER of Advertisement from a single Forum board?! 

I cast-eth my soul upon the SF-O Alter, for thou art not worthy of SF-O's benevolence and kindness! ahem.

Archaic speak vexes mineself - more on that anon. 

BUT WOW... Okay, I'm not very good at staying focused without rambling... and I did... so let me just get back to being blunt. 

SFO posting is the only thing I've started doing differently in recent times... and suddenly I notice a spike in my FF stats... I'm sure it has SOMETHING to do with you guys and SO I just wanted to say... THANK YOU!  Even if it wasn't ALL SFO posters, I still appreciate it. 

[DZComposer]

You know, you guys could be a little nicer to someone giving our community a compliment.

Anyway, it's hard to nail something like that down without having access to referrer logs. I don't think SFO is active enough to give you THAT many hits, unless someone here has been doing a lot of reading.

Don't forget the search engine spiders. Not all of them (I'm looking at you, MSN) obey robots.txt. Usually when I see unusual traffic spikes on my sites, they are the culprit. Plus, we've seen quite a few spiders here at SFO lately. They could have followed the links in your posts.

Either way, kudos on the increased views.

[Kit-Karamak]

From one musician to another, THANK YOU, DZ.  I appreciate it. 

The thing is, these hits are by chapter.  I kinda' figured when 150 people from Canada wanted to read 700 chapters worth of work... (it breaks each visitor down by country on FF.net) that I either did something right... or ...I dunno.  The only place I've been talking about my work was on this forum, as of late. xD

I'm not to keen on knowing much about Teh Interwebz.  For all I knew, SFO could easily have been the difference.  Out of 19 stories, only 5 or 6 are really actively read often... so if you take 2200 visitors and divide that by like, 5 or 6 stories... (even though one will usually get ridiculously more attention than another, but just the same), the break down is more like... I dunno... a few hundred actual visitors reading multiple stories. 

So I just figured it wasn't that much volume, but ... it was certainly much more than before.  Heck, I dunno.  I don't know much about spiders, etc, but I do know that whoever is doing it, they're reading EACH chapter.  One visitor will read 20-30 chapters over a day or two of time. 

I know I rambled on a few minutes ago.  I suppose that's just how I roll.  I'm just a big geek. >_>  But!  I was still surprised.  It kinda' doesn't make sense. 

[Kursed]

You know, you guys could be a little nicer to someone giving our community a compliment.

Anyway, it's hard to nail something like that down without having access to referrer logs. I don't think SFO is active enough to give you THAT many hits, unless someone here has been doing a lot of reading.

Don't forget the search engine spiders. Not all of them (I'm looking at you, MSN) obey robots.txt. Usually when I see unusual traffic spikes on my sites, they are the culprit. Plus, we've seen quite a few spiders here at SFO lately. They could have followed the links in your posts.

Either way, kudos on the increased views.

what are those search engine spiders by the way?  and umm your welcome I guess.

[Tiberius]

Oh. View counts. Well, your giant paragraph was pretty misleading so I didn't get it at first.

[Kit-Karamak]

Oh. View counts. Well, your giant paragraph was pretty misleading so I didn't get it at first.

I should stick to writing and music - I'm no good with monologues because I ramble about everything and I don't organize it very well, so I don't explain myself clearly.  Conversely, when I'm writing the part of a character, it doesn't seem as hard because I create dialogue and engage the topic differently.  >_> 

I should stick to those things.  I went into detail, or thought I was going into detail, about how I THINK those views and visitor numbers are recorded on that site.  I'm ASSUMING, because I've done nothing different in the last 18 months besides join SF-O, that it must be people here reading them.  Or people that are reading the forums but not actively joining in conversation... just clicking on the links or... god knows what.  I've tried pondering any other logical explanation OTHER than assuming that 1100 MORE people suddenly decided they liked my crappy material. 

I do NOT buy that theory.  IF there ARE 2200 people that like my work enough to read chapters 6000 times, I wanna meet'em.  Until I do, I don't believe it.  I think the counter is faulty, LOL.  It's PROBABLY more like 30 or 40 people that come to the ... no, that doesn't make sense either, because they wouldn't read every chapter 200 times EACH.  That's just retarded.  >_>

So, I tried logging out of FFnet and going to my own stories, chapter by chapter, to see how many times the counter would register...  It says "one visitor"  from the "USA" read *each* chapter of a 5 chapter story once.  That ONE visitor displayed 5 hits/reads/views.  (one for each chapter).  I waited ten minutes and went back and did it again.  It shows that each chapter was read 2 times (now showing 10 hits), but the "Visitor" number didn't increase.  THE NEXT DAY, I did it again.  Now I'm up to 15 views, but it still shows 1 visitor did it for the story (but it shows that there was one visitor on Sunday and One visitor on monday, yet over all, the story shows 15 hits for 1 visitor, for that month.)  So I dunno. 

I know I'm in denial, but I also know that I don't have some insane reader fanbase.  Nor are there that many Star Fox Fans  exclusively reading my work.  See where I'm coming from here?  That math doesn't make sense. 

I go out of my way to reply to EVERY review, every PM and every time someone fav's one of my pieces, I personally message them to show my appreciation.  It's NOT that many. 

Either way, one thing is for certain.  Even if it's just... 5 more readers than I had before... SF-O is somehow causing me to have increased traffic and... I appreciate that!

[Tiberius]

A little constructive critisizm. Although your posts are very in depth and all, you need to save that for big things. Sometimes you just need to be short, sweet, and to the point.

[Kit-Karamak]

Yeah, man.  I know what you mean.  I do it for characters more than I do it for myself.  It's called being "concise."  I fail at that.  I fail so hard. 

[Tiberius]

Well you got it there. Just don't reexplain so much.

[Velocity]

they wouldn't read every chapter 200 times EACH.  That's just retarded.  >_>

well I WOULD.

[Asper Sarnoff]

You're welcome. 

I'm sure it did help a lot, tough it probably don't explain it all. SF-O doesn't have that much traffic.

[Mr. Krystal]

It's possible, Kit. There's also the redirection effect: for every link to a resource, the things that link to the page with the link (Google, other Star Fox sites that link to SFO) will notice links to your fics in addition to the original page. Thus, in some cases, the popularity can become exponential.

[Kit-Karamak]

I'm seriously scratching my head, here!  I'm getting an even spread of 'hits' to each chapter.  I've only linked the first chapter to each of those stories... plus my Sly Cooper ones are showing a lot of action, which I've NOT linked.  My profile page hits are about twelve-a-day higher than usual, and I've not linked that to this page, either, I don't think.  I might have, somewhere... I'd have to look. 

I just... I suppose you and DZ have provided the best clues.  The only thing I can do is continue my productive rate for Detente, Regret, Marcus and keep my fingers crossed... and see if it happens again next month. ;

Then, next month, I'll slow down and time my updates to, maybe, say... once a week or something.  And in April, I'll look to see if there was a difference?  I dunno.  Or do it the other way around. 

I guess I'm just trying to find out what I've done right so I can emulate it.  If that requires posting links to my stories on every Anthro and game forum known to Teh Interwebz, then shoot... Why not, right? 

SO!  I went back and checked out December stats and matched'em up to the day I joined this forum... the 20th to be exact...  then I went and checked my stats after the 20th of December... then I looked up when I started my Reflections of StarFox thread on this forum... and I looked back at my stats page for FF.net... nothing changed.  Everything has been right around 225 (on average) hits a day from about 40-60 visitors a day.  There are a few spikes, like the last day of the month I jumped up to 500 views... but the rest of the month is about the same throughout.  It only has big jumps on days I posted an update to things like Detente and Reflections of Marcus. 

I will say, though, back in December I found SF-O by accident.  My band members and I were drinking and bored and decided to Google our names.  I couldn't even FIND myself in the top TEN for google... so I googled my pen name, Kit Karamak, and every result with me.  I think number five was someone mentioning my name on the SF-O board, lol. 

I think it was a post from Asper, actually. xD 

I was so amused by it that I made a name, joined and replied... it was thread necromancy at the time but... c'est la vie.  No one said anything so... lol. 

The funny thing is, Asper Sarnoff is the name of one of my original characters... so when I'm sitting there, looking at a google synopsis that says something to the effect of, "READ KIT KARAMAK'S WORK?!  - - Asper Sarnoff"  I was like, "...WHAT?! Seriously?! I've got to click this!" 

ahem. 

So what's the Redirection effect in detail?  Can you give me an example of how it might work?

[Asper Sarnoff]

^ Hehe, long story on how I used that name. I had just read Kit's stories when I started joining the various SF communities, stumped for any good options, and wanting something original, I settled for one of my favorite characters from the stories I had just read. A lizard/avian hybrid, training under Fara as a SpecOps and boyfriend of Falco's daughter.

It kind of snowballed on from there really. Saw no reason to change it and have to explain to people how I was the same, bonkers guy they had meet on DA under the name of Asper.

I might have opted for something different if I were to chose now. But I'm quite fine with Asper as well.

[Kit-Karamak]

LOL hey I'm not complaining.  It's the biggest form of flattery I know, other than that guy, Alex, "Mr.K" on Deviant Art, who was posting my Sly Cooper stories and removing the Author's Notes and claiming it was his work.  That was pretty flattering.  I was amused as all hell.  So then I posted a review to one of the chapters going, "THIS WORK IS CRAP! IT SUCKS!  WHERE IS THE REST OF THE STORY AND WHY ARE YOU TAKING WEEKS AT A TIME TO FINISH POSTING THEM?!?!"  Because the story had been finished and posted 3 years prior, HAHA.  I was criticizing all my self-known mistakes, too, LMAO! 

YOu'd THINK if you're going to post someone else's work, you'd have the decency to fix their mistakes!! LOL

Not that I could get upset about it - it wasn't something I owned, because it was fanfiction.  He wasn't stealing money from me in a sense.  Who cares, right?  I was pretty flattered, actually.  Then I private-messaged each of the fan readers following the story, pining for the next update... and said, "hey, the whole story is found *HERE* you guys!" and provided a link. 

But back to the topic... I really have to wonder if this forum was helping my page.  If so, that's truly awesome.  The only true way to know is to go back in time, keep myself from joining SF-O until the following month... then see if there is a difference.  xD

But then I might cause a time paradox and screw up everything.  That'd be bad... like... like crossing the streams!

[Mr. Krystal]

Redirection:

1. A page exists on the internet.

2. Every other page on the internet can potentially link to the above page, including itself.

3. Ever since Google popularized the associative form of website ranking, social networks and other search services have banked on this assumption: "If many people link to it, it is more likely to be popular."

4. Because a resource is linked to, it gains rank among all the pages, relative to where it was. This leads to higher visibility.

5. Increased visibility SOMETIMES leads to HIGHER levels of linking. If this process becomes self-sustaining (a meme), it will propagate itself purely via the internet equivalent of "word-of-mouth" : linking.

6. There's a limit, of course, to how many links will likely be made. And of course, the original content has to be good AND interesting to large number of people. And finally, search engines will guard against people gaming the system by creating artificially high numbers of links.

[Kit-Karamak]

I suppose the only logical thing to do... is to test this theory by posting links to my site in high-volume areas, like the Nintendo website forums, Anthrocon.org forums, deviant art, i dunno. 

You know, when Reflections of the FUTURE went up on your site, and when someone posted a link to it on Nintendo's old forums (several times, actually), it went crazy with views.  It is now currently the highest viewed story I have, nearing 37 thousand views (over the life-time of the story). 

Needless to say, they've tapered off over the years for that story but it still gets some measure of love. 

Surprisingly, Reflections of a New Generation (story about Marcus) drums up a lot of hits, even though not many people are fans of the 'children of starfox' stories.  Thanks for explaining how it works, I REALLY appreciate it. 

I know I've posted Detente in a few places and it was doing... okay.  Not bad.  Not as good as "regret" but... detente is still my favorite.  I'll keep posting work, though.  Now that I understand how it works, which makes sense, I'll do my best to advertise it, I suppose. lol

[Mr. Krystal]

I suppose the only logical thing to do... is to test this theory by posting links to my site in high-volume areas, like the Nintendo website forums, Anthrocon.org forums, deviant art, i dunno. 

That might cause the negative reaction I was talking about. Better to let others spread your word than you. Otherwise it can look like you're spamming.

[Star Fox Runner]

That might cause the negative reaction I was talking about. Better to let others spread your word than you. Otherwise it can look like you're spamming.

I agree, word of mouth (or in this case, text) can act as a better influence than spreading everything yourself, you wouldn't have gotten where you are in popularity if you hadn't done what you've already done.

[DZComposer]

what are those search engine spiders by the way?

They are bots that follow internet links and report various information about the sites the visit to the search engine. Basically, it's how a search engine knows about a site.

They are called spiders because they "crawl" around the web like a spider crawls around its web.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_crawler

SEO, or search engine optimization, is a controversial technique for increasing traffic to your site by using different means to make the spiders report data back that makes the engine list the site on the front page. This is controversial because these links are gaming the system rather than naturally meeting the requirements of a first-page result. Some of the more shady SEO companies employ spam bots that drop links on forums, blogs, and wikis. In fact, it is the #1 reason for such spam. The spam isn't for you the user, it's for the spider so that when someone Googles "Viagra" they get linked to a company selling cheap Chinese fake Viagra or pretending to sell it but getting money from ads instead.

[Kit-Karamak]

so, wait, wait... Cheap Chinese Viagra doesn't work!?!?!?! 

Ahem. Sorry.  Okay, fair enough.  Mr.K, DZ, your awesome advice has simply convinced me to do what I've been doing... be lazy and not promote.  xD

Regardless, less than a handful of people talk about me by word of mouth.  And that's no big deal, either.  Besides, I'll worry about street teams when I start churning out my original work in the future.  For now, I'm content to say, "HOLY SMOKES I GOT A LOT OF HITS THIS MONTH, HOLY HAND GRENADES OF ANTIOCH, BATMAN, ARE WE IN THE DARK ON HOW THIS HAPPENED!" 

Hmm, yes, Robin, it does seem that we were obfuscated on the reasoning behind such occurrences.  This is a job for the Bat Computer.  To the BatCave!

Back on topic, I suppose the only real way to spread my own name... is to review other people's work consistently... Creating a signature with a link to my own work shouldn't be necessary, as FFnet already links back to my profile from each review I post on other people's works. 

And I suppose that it's a little more honorable, too.

So... new direction for this thread... my WEEKEND is, more or less, SF-O powered right now.  Since I live halfway between Baltimore and DC, you might have heard in the local news that we're about to get "TEH UBER SNOH FRUM DA SKIEEZ"  Yes, that's right... on Wednesday they predicted a "historic storm coming your way."  That might be paraphrased but one doesn't need to be verbatim on issues of weather... it's all wrong half the time anyhow.  With the Appalachian mountains to the west, ocean to the east, (Mountains to the left of me, water to the right, here I am.. stuck in the middle with snow!  Sorry... Stealers Wheel moment) but yeah... it looks like I'm getting the snow... it's coming... so... yeah... my weekend will be SF-O powered.  >_> 

It's okay, though, I had no super bowl plans, anyhow.  Think I'll just write some, play SF:A with my 10 year old and try to help him get better musically.  I'll be bored otherwise.  He won't, though.  That boy LOVES snow. 

Anyone else getting snowed in this weekend?