I've always wanted to do a segment on this, but never had the time or the proper tools in which to perform such an analysis.
Full disclosure: this is more or less a hypothesis built upon observation. It does not, in any way, constitute fact. I don't know any more than any of you about how the rankings work. Part of me does this in the hopes that people smarter than I will contribute and add their two cents to this analysis.
In any case, I do believe there have been some fairly significant changes to the new ranking algorithm. Whether or not they make it better, I will leave up to you.
My personal opinion on the matter, is that the old one was better (for me, LOL!). But this current one is more fair.
Is it perfect? Of course not, there is always room for improvement. Would I change this current algorithm? Maybe not.
I did have a specific fondness for the one before it. I rather thought that the version of YuenRank that preceded this one had it's heart in the right place. This one is, for lack of a better word, more communist than it is democratic, whereas the last one, was far more capitalist, but neither one is worse than the other.
Huh?
Let's just get into it, shall we?
Here's a sample of the Hot List for Science Fiction as it appears on 3/28/2013"
Name Parts Pages Reads Votes Comments Measured Date Rank
The Gauntlet 31 88 604535 16446 1710 3/28/2014 1
UNE 23 254 126759 3468 387 3/28/2014 2
Risen: Darklight 66 285 1232405 17363 4838 3/28/2014 3
Sigma/Star 110 304 1799285 8058 996 3/28/2014 4
Immortalia 16 59 408408 16823 2447 3/28/2014 5
Children of the Plague 26 73 649896 6823 961 3/28/2014 6
Setting Suns 24 44 115170 1233 422 3/28/2014 7
ATLANTIS 25 116 33954 523 57 3/28/2014 8
Baron Schwiter 18 65 32345 1653 563 3/28/2014 9
Psych Investigation Episodes II 24 123 637294 26653 3234 3/28/2014 10
Silent Heroes: Wildcat 15 28 24962 1406 412 3/28/2014 11
Power Shift 20 51 243521 5074 2187 3/28/2014 12
Selection 25 75 335568 7948 1338 3/28/2014 13
Kuro 95 116 861190 16125 2226 3/28/2014 14
The Trials of the Core 58 154 31655 1238 209 3/28/2014 15
That's a strange wall of meaningless numbers, so let's try and make sense of it all.
As I've said before, Wattpad has particular focus on keeping things FAIR, which in my personal opinion is very good. How exactly do they keep things fair?
Well let's take my book Kuro for instance. It has 95 parts. In theory I have more parts, so I should get more reads. If Wattpad were blind to this, I would be doing pretty well.
But Wattpad is pretty smart. It now acknowledges that a big reason why Kuro does well is BECAUSE IT HAS MORE PARTS. It didn't used to do this, and I admit back in the day, I benefitted a lot from it.
So Wattpad does what I like to call PARITY. It takes an audit of the reads, and scores it based on the number of parts. VERY, VERY FAIR.
So let's run the PARITY algorithm against that group of books again, and divide the total reads by their total parts to equalize them:
Name Parity Reads Parity Votes Parity Comments Rank
The Gauntlet 19,501 531 55 1
UNE 5,511 151 17 2
Risen: Darklight 18,673 263 73 3
Sigma/Star 16,357 73 9 4
Immortalia 25,526 1,051 153 5
Children of the Plague 24,996 262 37 6
Setting Suns 4,799 51 18 7
ATLANTIS 1,358 21 2 8
Baron Schwiter 1,797 92 31 9
Psych Investigation Episodes II 26,554 1,111 135 10
Silent Heroes: Wildcat 1,664 94 27 11
Power Shift 12,176 254 109 12
Selection 13,423 318 54 13
Kuro 9,065 170 23 14
The Trials of the Core 546 21 4 15
Notice a trend yet? Yup, Wattpad is definitely calculating parity. Books with less parts are doing just as well as books with more parts, which is the way it SHOULD BE to make things fair. The books that are constantly on the Hot List really seem to be earning their spots with massive reads per part,
Now, let's take this one step further. Let's calculate a quality score of sorts, call it a Wattpad Score. This is a score that factors in the reads, the votes and the comments.
Now this might be a bit too technical, so I apologize. All I did to calculate the WP score was assign my own set of weights to each of the parity-adjusted variables: Reads, Votes and Comments. I did 20% reads, 40% votes, and 40% comments. It's a drastic oversimplification over the real YuenRank, but bear with me here:
Name WP Score Rank
The Gauntlet 4,134 1
UNE 1,169 2
Risen: Darklight
3,869 3
Sigma/Star 3,304 4
Immortalia 5,587 5
Children of the Plague 5,119 6
Setting Suns 987 7
ATLANTIS 281 8
Baron Schwiter 409 9
Psych Investigation Episodes II 5,809 10
Silent Heroes: Wildcat 381 11
Power Shift 2,580 12
Selection 2,833 13
Kuro 1,890 14
The Trials of the Core 119 15
Ah, now we're getting somewhere. Look at the relationship between the WP Score versus someone's rank. Doesn't the rank start to make sense now? The higher your WP Score, the higher your rank should be.
But wait, Mike, that's not exactly true though - you have books on here with terrible Wattpad Scores!
And you would be correct.
So we now move into Part 2 of my theory.
SLOTS
It took me a while to figure this out. Why are certain books doing so well on the Hot List versus my own? If we merely took the Wattpad score into account, my book would be doing far better.
Which is true, but not in the case of slots.
What are slots? Put simply, they are reserved spots for particular books. For the sake of simplicity, let's just say 5 slots are for Featured Stories, 3 slots are for popular stories that continue to update 2 slots are for old stories that are doing well, and 3 slots are for stories that Wattpad is "amplifying", 2 slots are "exceptions" (which I'll get to in a minute).
In reality, the slots are far more complex, but doing the 5-3-2-3-2 makes it a lot easier for us to talk about this.
What does this mean? Well, for one, where we all used to have a 1 in 15 chance of landing the first page of the Hot List, that's no longer true.
For my own books, Kuro now has a 1 in 5 chance (Featured slots), and Death Angel now has a 1 in 3 (new story slots). Now these are dramatically oversimplified. But let's think about the ramifications. To land the Hot List, I now have to be in the top 5 performing Featured Stories, or be in the top 3 performing new stories.
Is that fair? Yes, I guess it is.
Here's why: every book now has an equal chance. In a way, the Hot List is "equalizing" opportunity across the spectrum.
Why do this? Because of people's complaints that it has become far too difficult to compete against Featured Stories or really popular stories. Wattpad is attempting to address those complaints and granting "equal" opportunity for writers of all sizes.
But, for guys like me who are already somewhat popular, it has suddenly become much harder to land the Hot List. In other words, to make the first page of the Hot List, you now have to be in the top five books in your slot! My book Kuro is no longer competing with new stories, it's competing against other Featured stories and I have to be in the top five if I want to make it to first page!
That is why you are suddenly seeing big name Wattpad Authors struggling to make it in. So the competition for the Hot List has increased, but the algorithm is fairer across the board.
Am I complaining?
Not necessarily. I actually kind of approve.
Wattpad's giving a chance for more authors to shine. And making it harder for my own book to compete is kind of a good thing. Competiton is good.
Shortcomings
Now the new algorithm isn't perfect either and please do expect a second part to this, because I'm not done with the whole story!
Here are a few weaknesses I've noted.
1) The power of updates has been diminished. Remember when I said updating your story has the most power on Wattpad? That's not as true anymore. You still get priority, meaning Wattpad will show your book more often in its recommendations when you update but that's about all you get - you don't get priority on the ranking as much.
2) Vote Storms matter. A LOT. What's a vote storm? It's when someone goes in and votes for every chapter of your book. Vote storms get the algorithm's attention BIG TIME. It's why I've changed my books so much that I actually Actively ASK for them. The Votes matter so much on the new algo. On the old algorithm, I just need to get two vote storms a day to make it to the first page. Now, I need six. Why?
3) Because Featured Stories are no longer special. This is one of my key gripes on the new algorithm. Think you're special because you have a Featured Story? Guess what? You're not. In fact, you're so insignificant, you might as well not even bother at this point. Featured Stories used to get priority on the recommendations engine, so much so that you would actually get assigned a slot during the week for your work to shine. It didn't matter how good your book did, Wattpad would recommend the crap out of it just because you were Featured. I personally thought that was awesome, but that probably also was unfair to non-Featured Authors.
So Wattpad nixed it. Perhaps righteously.
But my problem is, why nix it? Featured Authors did something more than regular authors. We passed the test of quality. Why not give us a little something special? Right now, all we have is immortality - we get to stay on the Hot List as long as we want. But so do certain "other" books now. So it isn't a big advantage anymore.
Are you thinking of getting Featured because you think you'll get more popular? HOLD OFF. Don't do it right now. Right now, it is a
COMPLETE.
WASTE.
OF.
TIME.
4) Remember my rather vague reference to "exceptions"? That's what I want to talk about now. By far my biggest pet peeve right now are the Featured Stories that continue to update. Why is that? Because it flies in the face of what Wattpad is trying to accomplish. It is ANTI-COMPETITIVE.
There are not that many of these, but I have noticed that a handful of Featured Stories will continue to update on Wattpad. Now, WP is aware of this and is supporting it, but I'm not sure I agree with it.
Here's why: A Featured Story that continues to update (wait, aren't we supposed to make our book complete??? What the heck happened???) currently achieves Triple Karma on Wattpad. You have the update immunity of a Featured Story (which means you hardly ever "rank down"), compounded with the power of Wattpad's tendency to prioritize a book with a lot of reads when they update, and lastly, you have the "update" priority, which when combined with Featured Story power, is almost unfair.
What's the end result? A guaranteed slot on the first page of the Hot List. And it doesn't even have to be a decent update. For instance, I could update Kuro right now, and my update could say, "I love bananas, LOL!" and I would automatically make it to the first page of the Hot List. Doesn't matter that I actually had anything good to say, the algorithm will prioritize it. Now, if you actually have a chapter update, it's an almost guaranteed #1 or #2 on the Hot List, which is completely, not fair to anyone. Why? Because it's GUARANTEED, YO! It's not earned.
Now, I've seen very creative uses of this, that I approve of. I've seen authors use this as a way to talk about their second book and bring attention to it, or to make their fans happy by adding little snippets here and there, like a favorite song, or more info. I actually like that, I think that's genius and is a great way to add value for your fans.
But when an author goes in and puts Book 2 into Book 1, or worse, puts Book 2 AND 3 as part of Book 1 that I think it's unfair. Why? Because that author is very obviously riding on the coattails of their original book and using that as a vehicle to continue to rank. It's no longer about writing a good book. It's all about RANKING.
It's like a politician that refuses to step down once their term is over.
I would never, EVER do this because I want my second book to stand on it's own merits and not just because of the popularity of my first book. When you think about it, once you've had a successful #1 book, you already have an established fan base. It's already somewhat unfair. And that's something I am deeply cognizant of. I'm under no illusions that my second book (Death Angel) is doing well, purely because I have an existing fanbase. So I am very careful not to exploit that.
But Featured Authors that continue to update??? Look, I get that your book did well the first time around, but why the heck would you want to continue to ride the success of your first book and continue to update the rest as part of that first book?
It's unfair.
You're permanently hogging a spot on the Hot List.
Step Down.
Write a new book.
Let that book stand on it's own.
Ok, I'm done ranting. :)
Stay tuned for the next part. :D