Fimfiction has more pageviews than all online speculative fiction magazines combined · 1:09am June 20th
I'm using the Submission Grinder to decide where to submit some fantasy stories. The Submission Grinder list pretty much all of the known active speculative fiction markets, and lets you filter them based on conditions like whether they're recognized by SFWA as a pro market, or what genres they list in their guidelines.
One thing it doesn't list is how many people read the magazine or website. All magazines used to list their circulation number, which is not always clearly defined, but gives you a good idea how many people read it. AFAIK, none do today. But since all magazines have an online presence now, any measure of their web traffic will give you some idea of their relative popularity.
The kicker is that there are some online magazines that pay pro rates (eg Etherea, Factor Four), or that have been nominated for a Hugo or Nebula (eg Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet), which few people read. And IMHO the thing you want most is not 8 cents per word, or a theoretical chance at being nominated for a Hugo, but readers, and reader comments.
Someone, maybe ICANN or Google, used to provide free website rankings, but now they are hard to find, as Google elevates the search results for companies that charge you to see the rankings (and hence can pay Google to elevate their search results). I did find one free website ranker at ahref.com. I don't know how they get their estimates of traffic--some language on the website suggests it's based on querying Google search statistics, in which case it wouldn't count people like you and me, who have a fimfiction tab open all the time and never use a search engine to get there. But the estimates seem to be proportional to popularity.
So I went thru all of the places I was interested in submitting to, and checked their ahrefs.com traffic estimate (using the "count subdomains" setting):
MAGAZINE BLING PAY AHREFS.COM TRAFFIC
Abyss & Apex 1 $80 47
Adi 0 10-20 259
Allegory 0 $15 13
Analog 3 8 1400
Apex 3 8 1600
Asimov's SF 3 8 923
Beneath Ceaseless Skies 3 8 163
Cast of Wonders 1 8 110
Clarkesworld 3 12 1300
The Dark 1 5 626
The Deadlands 0 10 566
Etherea 0 10 12
Factor Four 0 11 35
F&SF 3 8 2
Flash Fiction Online 1 $100 1600
Interzone 2 1 229
Lightspeed 3 8 3500
Metastellar 0 8 635
Nightmare 3 8 2700
PodCastle 2 8 2200
PseudoPod 1 8 3900
Small Wonders 0 10 36
Strange Horizons 3 10 4300
Uncanny 3 10 2400
TOTAL 28556Here "BLING" means how many badges they have in the upper-right corner, for things like SFWA-recognized, Hugo-nominated, etc., PAY is either cents per word or flat fee for original stories, and the final column is ahrefs.com web traffic estimate.
Things I noticed:
- The web traffic is biggest for the best-known and highest-paying magazines. No surprise there, except that Fantasy & Science Fiction has the lowest web traffic estimate of all. This is because they aren't an online magazine. You have to buy a dead-tree copy.
- Podcasts do really well. The Escape Pod Artists have several podcast "magazines", which buy originals or reprints and make audio recordings of them, including PodCastle (fantasy), Escape Pod (SF), PseudoPod (horror), & Cast of Wonders (YA). (I didn't list Escape Pod bcoz ahref estimated its traffic at zero, which is probably a bug.)
Then I checked fimfiction, to get some idea how its audience compared to those of the big SF&F magazines:
fimfiction - - 53900So, fimfiction.net gets more web traffic than all of the online speculative fiction magazines combined! I didn't list all of them here, but I've studied many distributions like this. They roughly fit an equation where web traffic =~ 1 / rank^c, where 'rank' is a magazine's rank (rank 1 is the biggest), and c is a constant that's usually around 2. The upshot is that even if there were an infinite number of magazines, the web traffic decreases exponentially with rank, so you only have to add up the top 6 or 7 to get half of the traffic, no matter how many magazines there are. There is no way that adding all the remaining little magazines would add another 25,000 to the web-traffic total.
But before your head gets swole, let's see some more comparisons:
fimfiction - - 53900
fanfiction.net - - 1300000
AO3 - - 4800000
wattpad.com - - 30000000I have long suspected wattpad of grossly exaggerating their readership figures, but these are estimates based on search queries, so maybe they really do have as many readers as they claim. If so, the entirety of the very-public speculative-fiction "fandom", consisting of the famous writers you see in the (rapidly-disappearing) bookstores, and the fans who attend Worldcon and horror conventions and so forth, represent from 1/100th to 1/1000th of the readership of speculative fiction. (Depending on whether slashfic about boy bands counts as speculative.)
Three major reasons:
We have an amazing animated cartoon and world
We have amazing creative fans
We have an awesome webmaster
~Has HTML coding flashbacks.~
Ahem. I'll have you know I regularly close out my tabs and use bookmarks like a civilized person. Still means I'm not using a search engine but it's the principal of the matter.
These are some interesting results, thanks for sharing.
Neat.
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Correct reason: We have an incredible amount of porn. Close to 30% of all material on the site, by my estimate.
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The real real reason: the MLP franchise is already a thing people are aware of in popular culture, and people seek out what's familiar, not what's new and novel.
The hard truth for original fiction authors is that getting readership in significant numbers, at least without the extraordinary luck of getting a big publisher behind you to do the marketing heavy lifting and push your book into public awareness, is a nightmare difficulty level challenge because no one cares about your story in a universe with no previous continuity filled with characters they don't already know.
Fanfiction often ends up winning by far in reader numbers on a level playing field vs. original fiction because readers feel more drawn to read something in a universe they already have some kind of emotional stake in.
This is something everyone already knew, even if the elitists deny it. If you included actual dedicated pornography sites, I suspect those would blow everything else out of the water (even despite the people who don't want their search history to know about that).
(Note: elitists are not necessarily the actual elite. The overlap exists, but Dunning and Kruger proved that it's fairly small.)
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Isn't everyone an elitist? I'm an elitist, because I think ponyfic is better than what I find in the magazines listed above, which in turn is better than the crap in the literary magazines. I'm just an elitist with a lot of company.
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There’s a ton of Very AU™ stories on AO3 that are clearly original fiction with all the nouns changed to fit into a franchise so it can be published as fanfiction and have a chance of anypony reading it.
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That's interesting. And ironic. What fandoms are they usually posted in?
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Whichever one is most popular on AO3 at the time. Common recipients include Doctor Who, Harry Potter, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a few other TV shows I don’t watch—mostly fandoms that are either broadly popular or extremely popular with women.
That's some neat analysis!
Not to dump more analysis on your plate, but there are a lot more online fiction platforms than the four listed there, and some of them are less, er, obvious than others - running the gamut from Royal Road and FictionPress to DeviantArt and 4chan. You really gotta wonder how these all compare to each other, or the extent to which they can even be compared...