Moonpearl
The Yuri Empress
- Joined
- Dec 25, 2018
- Messages
- 764
- Points
- 133
I was bored yesterday and I'm procrastinating on planning my novel today, so I carried out some mostly half-assed SH analysis with Excel. I thought it might be worth sharing the results here nonetheless.
The figures for these stats were taken on the 29th and 30th of July 2020.
I only analysed the things that interested me and I don't think there's a hefty amount to say about them, so this is almost pure data. I can answer some questions about it, but I'm not taking requests to do extra analysis. This was painful enough when doing it for myself, thank you very much.
Comparison of Novel Numbers
To get these, I went to the rankings for each genre and took the ranking number of the lowest-ranked novel.
Because of the high number of Transgender Storytime novels we have here now, which are pretty much their own little genre, I added the "Transgender" tag to give them a space in this data.
Keep in mind that the Transgender tag can be used for both transgender-themed stories and stories that just have some transgender characters, so these figures are probably not totally accurate for the "Genre".
I also included how many genres the top novel (ranked by Popularity) of each Genre had, to show where overlap might occur. They pretty much all had 9, and many of the top novels across genres were the same.
Which lead me to realise a particular issue that makes this analysis only partially useful: because we can't filter by Main Genre (or even access that information at all), this data tells you little to nothing about the success brought by writing a particular genre, because there's no way of knowing which of the 9 "genres" of a given novel attracted the most attention. Some of these novels may not even have much of that "Genre" at all, making them a red herring.
I did dive into the reader numbers for the top two novels of each Genre as well, ranked by popularity. This gives you an idea of how popular novels in a particular genre have the potential to become, but not too much, because Popularity is actually ranked by number of views, it appears.
When ranked by number of readers, there were novels that vastly outranked the top Popularity novels - however, I ended up with a non-BL novel at the top of the BL Genre list, so I decided that Popularity was going to be the closest to accurate.
So, without further ado, here are your facts and figures.
Comparison of Reader Numbers of Top 2 Novels
Analysis of Romance and Harem
Because you don't get a handy novel ranking when you combine a lot of features on the Series Finder, I calculated the numbers for these slightly more manually. After counting that each full page of novels contained 25 novels, I would go to the last page of the search and count how many novels were on the final, not entirely filled page. I then multiplied 25 by the number of pages in the search minus 1 and then added the number of novels from the last page.
These were sought out using "AND" specifications rather than "OR", to force the most accuracy.
First, a comparison of Hetero vs BL vs GL. BL and GL were pulled from the original Genre count. Hetero was sought out by searching for the Romance genre minus Girls Love and Boys Love.
I also compared the number of heterosexual harem novels according to whether it was a man's harem or a woman's harem. To get this, I excluded BL and GL from the search.
There may be outliers that snuck into this data too.
For those unfamiliar with the terms:
Harem = A harem of women for a single man; may not be real multi-relationship
Reverse Harem = A harem of men for a single woman; may not be real multi-relationship
Polygamy = One man with many wives (marriage required)
Polyandry = One woman with many husbands (marriage required)
Analysis of the Interaction Between BL & GL and GB & Transgender
We have a lot of new GL with the Transgender tag, so I was interested to see what the make-up of the novels under the Girls Love genre was like. Of course, we have a lot of Gender Bender novels under that tag too, many of which are not about a transgender MC, and whether or not conventional GB is or isn't "real" GL is a controversial topic, so... I separated it all out for us.
I also carried out the same analysis for BL, for comparison and to sate my curiosity.
Again, I can't promise that these are all novels with transgender MCs or transgender themes. Someone may have tagged for the MC's best friend being transgender or something. But this is as good as it gets.
(The categories for this were done really lazily because I came down with a migraine. As a little key for the confused:
No GB or Trans = Conventional GL or BL with neither Gender Bender nor transgender characters
GB no Trans = A Gender Bender GL or BL but with no transgender characters
Trans no GB = A GL or BL with transgender characters which is not a Gender Bender novel
GB and Trans = A Gender Bender GL or BL with transgender characters)
The figures for these stats were taken on the 29th and 30th of July 2020.
I only analysed the things that interested me and I don't think there's a hefty amount to say about them, so this is almost pure data. I can answer some questions about it, but I'm not taking requests to do extra analysis. This was painful enough when doing it for myself, thank you very much.
Comparison of Novel Numbers
To get these, I went to the rankings for each genre and took the ranking number of the lowest-ranked novel.
Because of the high number of Transgender Storytime novels we have here now, which are pretty much their own little genre, I added the "Transgender" tag to give them a space in this data.
Keep in mind that the Transgender tag can be used for both transgender-themed stories and stories that just have some transgender characters, so these figures are probably not totally accurate for the "Genre".
I also included how many genres the top novel (ranked by Popularity) of each Genre had, to show where overlap might occur. They pretty much all had 9, and many of the top novels across genres were the same.
Which lead me to realise a particular issue that makes this analysis only partially useful: because we can't filter by Main Genre (or even access that information at all), this data tells you little to nothing about the success brought by writing a particular genre, because there's no way of knowing which of the 9 "genres" of a given novel attracted the most attention. Some of these novels may not even have much of that "Genre" at all, making them a red herring.
I did dive into the reader numbers for the top two novels of each Genre as well, ranked by popularity. This gives you an idea of how popular novels in a particular genre have the potential to become, but not too much, because Popularity is actually ranked by number of views, it appears.
When ranked by number of readers, there were novels that vastly outranked the top Popularity novels - however, I ended up with a non-BL novel at the top of the BL Genre list, so I decided that Popularity was going to be the closest to accurate.
So, without further ado, here are your facts and figures.
Comparison of Reader Numbers of Top 2 Novels
Analysis of Romance and Harem
Because you don't get a handy novel ranking when you combine a lot of features on the Series Finder, I calculated the numbers for these slightly more manually. After counting that each full page of novels contained 25 novels, I would go to the last page of the search and count how many novels were on the final, not entirely filled page. I then multiplied 25 by the number of pages in the search minus 1 and then added the number of novels from the last page.
These were sought out using "AND" specifications rather than "OR", to force the most accuracy.
First, a comparison of Hetero vs BL vs GL. BL and GL were pulled from the original Genre count. Hetero was sought out by searching for the Romance genre minus Girls Love and Boys Love.
I also compared the number of heterosexual harem novels according to whether it was a man's harem or a woman's harem. To get this, I excluded BL and GL from the search.
There may be outliers that snuck into this data too.
For those unfamiliar with the terms:
Harem = A harem of women for a single man; may not be real multi-relationship
Reverse Harem = A harem of men for a single woman; may not be real multi-relationship
Polygamy = One man with many wives (marriage required)
Polyandry = One woman with many husbands (marriage required)
Analysis of the Interaction Between BL & GL and GB & Transgender
We have a lot of new GL with the Transgender tag, so I was interested to see what the make-up of the novels under the Girls Love genre was like. Of course, we have a lot of Gender Bender novels under that tag too, many of which are not about a transgender MC, and whether or not conventional GB is or isn't "real" GL is a controversial topic, so... I separated it all out for us.
I also carried out the same analysis for BL, for comparison and to sate my curiosity.
Again, I can't promise that these are all novels with transgender MCs or transgender themes. Someone may have tagged for the MC's best friend being transgender or something. But this is as good as it gets.
(The categories for this were done really lazily because I came down with a migraine. As a little key for the confused:
No GB or Trans = Conventional GL or BL with neither Gender Bender nor transgender characters
GB no Trans = A Gender Bender GL or BL but with no transgender characters
Trans no GB = A GL or BL with transgender characters which is not a Gender Bender novel
GB and Trans = A Gender Bender GL or BL with transgender characters)
| GL | BL | |
| No GB or Trans | 170 | 296 |
| GB no Trans | 75 | 15 |
| Trans no GB | 13 | 2 |
| GB and Trans | 69 | 4 |
