Where'd You Come From? Where'd You Go?: A Little Mucking Around in Fimfiction Referrals · 9:08pm May 14th
I like to peek at the stats pages on my stories from time to time, especially at the referrals section. It's interesting to see where people are coming from.
There's some funny things in there sometimes. For example, when I published my latest story I shared it on my Bluesky and Mastodon accounts. I don't have a large following, so it was not surprising that I didn't actually get any views that way.
What was surprising was the people arriving via Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I am not active on any of those sites, so I have no idea how links ended up there.
The process of writing this out got me in the mood to do some broader investigating. I collected all the stats from all my stories and, with the help of a little python, combined them all into one neat table:
google.com 934 yahoo.com 107 duckduckgo.com 104 instagram.com 101 youtube.com 100 facebook.com 95 bing.com 95 twitter.com 92 m.baidu.com 73 fimfetch.net 56 Fimfiction.net 40 equestriadaily.com 24 baidu.com 23 louderyay.blogspot.com 12 derpibooru.org 8 m.youtube.com 7 sys.4channel.org 6 yandex.ru 5 google.co.uk 5 FIMFiction.net 5 t.umblr.com 4 translate.googleusercontent.com 4 tabun.everypony.ru 4 mlpficreviews.org.uk 4 inbrowserapp.com 4 google.ca 4 reddit.com 3 m.search.naver.com 3 search.yahoo.com 2 old.reddit.com 2 l.instagram.com 2 l.facebook.com 2 google.pl 2 desuarchive.org 2 yandex.com 1 wap.sogou.com 1 plagscan.com 1 m.sogou.com 1 lens.google.com 1 i.ytimg.com 1 google.com.ua 1 google.com.ph 1 fimfiction.com 1 feedly.com 1 com.google.android.talk 1 com.google.android.googlequicksearchbox 1 bsky.app 1
It's mostly search engines, of course (though I do wonder who is using Google to find pony fanfic rather than searching on the site).
There's the aforementioned social media sites. And also a fair few hits from Youtube, as I have been fortunate enough to have had a few readings of my stories done.
I see that something was posted on Equestria Daily at one point. It may not mean what it once did, but it does feel like a box checked off.
And then there's a long tail of miscellaneous sites. I think the one that amuses me most is the one from "plagscan.com." Did somebody get caught trying to bum a good grade off me for their creative writing class?
