So obviously there's been a huge increase in posting in 2008 compared to 2007. January '08 was 30% bigger than the next highest month, and March '08 witnessed the first time YWS broke 20,000 posts. April looks like it'll be somewhere between 22,000 and 25,000 posts (the high end is actually more likely). This all compared to 2007 when the highest posting month was around 11,800 posts.
But where is this activity coming from? Is it benefiting the literary side of YWS, or is all this activity just in the community forums? After all, YWS' pay to post policy ended in mid-November, so one might think there is much more randomness going on.
Now before I continue, the people you need to thank are Big Brother and the Junior Moderators. They hound new reviewers to help them out, and they ensure that YWS remains a friendly, welcoming environment. Besides them, there are dozens of other members who are making YWS what it is.
So obviously what I have to say is very good...
Explanation of the Stats
All the statistics are for posts in certain areas, with two exceptions. The two exceptions are for the amount of topics created in Fiction and Poetry. This is to help show what the topic to comment ratio is.
For General Discussion, all general discussion forums are added in. For Literary Misc., the storybook area has been subtracted out.
Also, all these numbers may be inconsistent with numbers I have shown before, but not to a large degree (with the odd exception of March). This is because everything below is according to GMT time whereas everything I usually share is according to my (EST) time. Usually only a difference of a couple hundred posts, but for March this means a difference of 700 posts.
View the Stats
All the statistics are included at the bottom.
The Lounge & Randomness
Far from being active, The Lounge & Randomness are two of the quietest areas of the site, and are actually declining in activity. Both hit a high in November and have dropped since then. So even though site activity has increased almost 100%, the activity in these two areas is down.
Debate
I included this one because I felt like the debate group was really active. Surprisingly though, it's only been active in 2008. Maybe this would change if I included more info from 2007, but the last two months, it was pretty much dead.
For some reason, it saw a huge jump in March. Not quite sure why. Maybe people are in a bad mood in March and thus in the right mood for arguing?
Storybooks
From November through January, the storybooks area grew no faster than the rest of the site. But they jumped all of a sudden in February (61% higher than January), and then again in March (58% higher than February).
So storybooks increased their share of the site from 12.5% in November to 27.5% in March. Given such a huge increase, a fear arises that it's stealing activity from Fiction & Poetry. However, that'd be an unfounded fear.
Fiction
Fiction has increased it's share of site activity from 15.5% in November to 16.5% in March. So, not much. But is the reason less relative interest?
Nope. In fact, the comment to topic ratio in Fiction has dramatically increased from 5.2 to 7.2. That's a 40% increase!
So why did it just barely grow from November to March? The answer is that people aren't writing more than they used to on average. This makes sense. You can only write so much in one month, so there's unlikely ever to be an increase in writing that is out of proportion to the site's growth. And in fact, the data does back this up.
To illustrate somewhat better, imagine that the average person writes 5 stories a month. Now lets say that the number of members double each month. Starting with just one member, that's 195 members after eight months. Tremendous site growth, but the average is still going to be just 5. So the stories keep the same share of the site as they used to.
If that makes any sense to anyone but me...
Poetry
That's all good and fine for fiction, which has been increasing every month, but what about Poetry, which is down a bit from January?
Even though Poetry in March was down from January, the comment ratio stayed just about the same. So the analysis I did above applies here too. That is, the problem isn't that people aren't commenting, it's that they aren't writing poetry. The former would be a big problem, the latter, a mere curiosity. As long as people are commenting, then awesome!
And indeed, the comment to topic ratio has increased for poetry as well from 5.7 in November to 7.1 in March, an increase of 25%!
Concluding Thoughts
More people are reviewing, less energy is being spent on randomness, and more creative energy is being devoted to storybooks. All of these things are good things. Indeed, I would actually like to see more activity in The Lounge!
