AO3 hitcount meme

I didn't do this last year because I thought, "Hey, newer stuff will have more hits, isn't it obvious?" Well, it wasn't obvious.

1. Amenable. Sherlock (Sherlock/John), explicit, 6,100 words, posted January 2011. (25,228 hits)

2. Home. Sherlock (Sherlock/John), explicit, 4,000 words, posted January 2011. How did I have so much time on my hands in January 2011? (17,519 hits)

3. Breaking and Entering. Inception (Arthur/Eames), explicit, 8,600 words, posted July 2011. (15,091 hits.)

4. Exactly the Way You Like It. Marvel Avengers Universe (Steve Rogers/Tony Stark), explicit, 2,000 words, posted October 2011. (13,229 hits.)

5. Close Enough. Sherlock (Sherlock/John), explicit, 3,100 words, posted April 2011. (12,680 hits.)

Then there's a big hit gap -- from 12,000 down to 6,000 ...

6. Steve Likes Tony. Marvel Avengers Universe (Steve Rogers/Tony Stark), explicit, 3,100 words, posted January 2012. (6,212 hits.)

7. Accommodations. Marvel Avengers Universe (Steve Rogers/Tony Stark), teen, 3,600 words, posted February 2012. (5,541 hits.)

8. Contact. Sherlock (Sherlock/John), all audiences, 400 words, posted March 2011. (4,458 hits.)

9. Phatic. Stargate Atlantis (Rodney McKay/John Sheppard), explicit, 1,700 words, posted October 2011, co-written with cesperanza. (3,332 hits.)

10. Transfigurations. Harry Potter (Draco/Harry), explicit, 71,000 words (holy shit, really?), first posted April 2003. (2,994 hits.)

Things I expected to see in the top 10 but did not: Higher Education is #12, Advantage is #17.

Conclusions I draw from this:

- They're all in really, really active fandoms except for "Phatic," which is benefitting from the cesperanza effect, and "Breaking and Entering," which came in on the trailing end of a fandom that had once been hugely active and apparently had more eager readers than fanworks at that point..

- Obviously they're mostly explicit, because what else do I write? "Accommodations" got more hits than I would have predicted given its teen rating, but demand for Avengers content is really high right now.

- I don't really understand "Contact" (400 words of G-rated hugging) being in there.

- Fandom likes stories to be of meaty length. My ten stories with lowest hit count are nine with less than 1,000 words, plus one that's het. And yet ... I don't really have anything else Transfig-length to compare, but I'd be willing to bet that an 8,000-word story would get more hits than a 50,000-word story, all other things being equal.

- The huge majority of people looking at "Transfigurations" are still looking at it on In Medias Res rather than AO3.

- All but "Exactly The Way You Like It" are first-time stories, but I'm not sure that's significant, since, again, what else do I write?