Notability Standards for Webnovels/Webcomics

[Jinsye]

I feel like this is something that definitely needs to be codified.

What are our standards for webnovel verses? Inspired by these two threads.

Currently, multiple staff members have given statements regarding this.

Well, I suppose that we might be able to lessen our requirement to 100,000 views for the initial chapter of webnovels if what you say is accurate. We still need some safeguards in place after all.

Hard to say. As you've said, it's an expansive work (too many chapters). The overall view count is reasonably high but accounting for how many things that is divided between, it isn't really. Being able to see the viewcount of the first chapter would be ideal. Taking it with a grain of salt, web traffic seems unusually low for something with so many views.

The number of reviews is decent, and there does exist a (barely maintained, insofar as I can tell) wiki for the thing. The webnovel site it is hosted on reports it as being very popular on that site, although truthfully, looking at the "power ranking" system they have going on, I have doubts as to whether that actually means much. It seems to be a case where the top weekly views for a given piece of work are like. 1000, ish, in that ballpark. And this one isn't the top one.

Considering that I have written shortstories with that many views, I don't think that is that impressive for a first chapter alone.

Given, first chapter views are basically a matter of clickbait, so I wouldn't take that as the primary measure anyway. Average views IMO are more expressive.

So, that leads us to a question of "What is notable?"

Initial/single chapter views are difficult and require a lot of guesswork. Because a lot of sites don't give those stats. In the threads mentioned above, we have people going "Well, this similar webnovel had 95k views in its initial chapter and the rest are more popular, thus it should be more than 100k". It also only lets the top of the top webnovels in anyways, which I'll get into later.

Average views actively punish verses for having writers that keep on going. Worm has 302 chapters and peaked at around 1.3 million monthly views. A simple average viewcount per chapter removes a lot of the nuances and greatly underrates seemingly popular verses.

To go into more stats, a little bit of digging told me one of the most popular webnovels on Japanese website "Shousetsuka ni Narou", known as Tensei Shitara Slime Datta Ken (also known as That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime) hasn't even breached 1 million total views (it has 900k evaluation points, which is based off of views, comments, and evaluations. Even assuming that there are extra viewers unaccounted for it'd definitely have a really low mark) in its over 300 chapters. Is it now not notable despite being one of the top stories on the website?

Most of the Royal Road items also have high views but lots of chapters, so average viewcount doesn't work. We also can hardly determine individual chapter viewcounts most of the time. So are we just going based on vibes?

By most of these metrics, both Worm and the webnovel iteration of Reincarnated as A Slime would probably have to be deleted. So, what exactly determines "notability"?

(Most of this applies to webcomics too but I can't find a lot of stats for those)

 

[SweetDao]

Absolute peak, I'll be there to support.

 

[Astral_Trinity439]

To go into more stats, a little bit of digging told me one of the most popular webnovels on Japanese website "Shousetsuka ni Narou", known as Tensei Shitara Slime Datta Ken (also known as That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime) hasn't even breached 1 million total views (it has 900k evaluation points, which is based off of views, comments, and evaluations. Even assuming that there are extra viewers unaccounted for it'd definitely have a really low mark) in its over 300 chapters. Is it now not notable despite being one of the top stories on the website?

Just to cIarify, as an EngIish SIime reader myseIf, SIime on its officiaI site has quite Iess views as it is onIy in japanese, and its EngIish viewers are far more then that. For exampIe, even on just a singIe EngIish site, it has more than 5 miIIion views, and that is given it was upIoaded on that site 5 years ago since the EngIish transIation came in Iater, a bit before 2020, not even its originaI airing date which was 2013~2015.

AdditionaIIy, on sites where it was upIoaded even after that, after 2020, it reached 13000+ ratings, which just goes to show how many views it got there.

Even I, as a sIimereader, onIy discovered the japanese site far after I had finished reading the entire Web NoveI, specificaIIy when I joined scaIing. So using the views on that site was base is, weII, unfair.

 

[Dark_Soul20189]

Sorry to say, but WN Tensura has breached over 400 000 000 views... I'm not sure where you got the statistics. Butt this was announced by Fuze himself when he got the anime going