Discussion Has Web Novel Readership Gone Stagnant?

So, I finally got some time off after I'm done translating My Disciple Died Yet Again, (Totally not an advertisement!) and because I'm taking a course on SEO, I'm looking into web traffic and stuff like that. Out of boredom, I decided to take a look at how things are doing in the web novel world, and I found some interesting results.

If you're lazy to read the possible chunk of text that will follow, here's the TLDR:
I found out that across all popular web novel platforms, the amount of traffic has been stagnant for the past months. Aggregators on the other hand are getting steadily more traffic each month. Do you think aggregators are the cause for stagnant readership, or are there other reasons? And what are the ways you think can increase readership?

=======================================

Yeah, so when you think about big names for web novels, you would obviously think about Wuxiaworld and Qidian, right? Well, if you don't, too bad, from results with Google Analytics tool, they are the biggest, with Wuxiaworld.com netting 19M visits and 5.3M for Webnovel.com.

The numbers here might differ across different analytical tools, for example, if I use SimilarWeb's instead, I would get 38.4M visits for Wuxiaworld.com, and 25.5M visits for Webnovel.com. The reason why they differ is because different tools have different ways of calculating traffic. However, these numbers aren't exactly important here, as I'm looking into the trend in the recent months, which are roughly the same across the tools.



From the chart above, you can see that traffic has been pretty stagnant throughout the months, with traces of visits going down in the recent months as well.

Of course, it might not be fair to compare just the large groups, right? 'Cause readers might have gone to the smaller sites instead (like mine!). Below are the stats for imoutosite.wordpress.com which does cute loli stuffs, and mistycloudtranslations.com which does Black Belly Miss and many other OP female MC things.



From the results, there are indeed traces of growth in traffic. I'm attributing the growth between Feb and May to more frequent releases on their sites. (From eye-balling their release updates on NU) However, even though there has been more releases between May and Jul, traffic has grown stagnant once more over here.

Of course, these might not give a full view on the readership numbers. According to the analysis on the different web novel sites, Novelupdates.com, our very own NU, takes up a bulk of the referral source of traffic for every site. So it should give us an answer on readership trend to a certain extent.



And... just like the results prior to this, you can see that traffic is pretty stagnant here as well.

...

So, why?

While I was pondering about this question, I caught something when I looked through the sites' top categorical ranking, and I found one of the aggregators pretty high at the top! I won't point out the site's name, but let's just say it has a very similar site address to Wuxiaworld, so I ended up comparing the two below.




As you can see, our fellow aggregator is enjoying increasing traffic with every month! From the initial ~2M in Feb, to 8M in Jul. I would also like to bring the attention to the bounce rates. To put it simply, bounce rate calculates the percentage of visitors that navigates away from the site after visiting only a single page. So, what this implies is that, seeing that the aggregator has a lower bounce rate, people that goes into the aggregate site is actually staying because it's the site they want to be in, and not because it's a mistype of the site address or whatsoever!

And this is not the only aggregator out there! Another aggregator that goes by the name *************.org is also getting increasing amount of traffic as well. So could aggregators stealing readers be the main reason why readership growth in the actual translation sites is growing stagnant?

...

Personally (big words here to catch your attention), I feel that there aggregators aren't the main reason. I'm more leaning to the idea that there hasn't been much marketing efforts when it comes to this sector. Wuxiaworld is the first web novel translation site that got onto international news. But the news sites that Wuxiaworld is being mentioned in aren't actually read by many English readers. (Global Times and Xinhua are both very Chinese-y news sites) Not to mention the major articles on Wuxiaworld were written all the back in 2016, with barely any news of it this year.

When it comes to social media, Wuxiaworld is doing a considerably good job on Facebook with frequent updates and user interaction. But Volare does not seem to be faring well on this end with very limited user contribution on both their Facebook and Twitter. (I'm judging based on comments, likes, and shares) Much can be done to improve in this area, which will likely improve readership. (For example, some sort of post sharing event?)

Well that's the end of my analysis. If you managed to read up till here, I applaud you! You managed to survive a horrendously messy and unplanned chunk of text! I'm not that good of a writer to begin with, and it's like 2.30am in the morning right now, so... Ohohoho. I should get some sleep.

As for the sites I mentioned here, if I offended any of you in any way, please know that it's not on purpose. Ohohoho.

But yeah, please feel free to pen down your thoughts here, and what you think can increase readership. I'm pretty sure there are many things that I didn't consider (or I'm just lazy to). I would like to know what you guys think!

 

TLDR, i'd say translatorship went down, disallowing us to read to our content.

 

Webnovel *could* have thrived, but a lot of their choices did put people away from their site. Aggregators simply gave them a place to go to.

 

Wouldnt it just be because there isnt much growth in the readerbase overall (unless you live in an asian country, i doubt many people know about novels without being introduced, and idk about you, but i don't go around introducing random people), and since new readers wont know the difference between an aggregator and the legit translator, the few that actually come will be more likely to go to an aggregator than the legit translator (since there's probably multiple aggregators for 1 novel, while theres only 1 legit translator)

Pretty sure OP is talking about web novels in general, and not Qidian.

 

Yea unscientifically my own views is so this a good.number of novels I read have gone dead or slowed up a lot on releases.

 

A lot of the aggragator population cones from QI haters. And once they are there, they like the fact that they can easily get to other novels. Aggragator are easier to use than coming to NU and doing it all. But stop, not very. It's just that new users who are coming in don't give too much importance to the ethics of reading a TL in the original site only. This is similar to mangas as well.

 

and I'm talking about webnovel.

I don't have much knowledge on other aggregators so I won't/can't talk about those.

 

I will say in the example of my disciple died novel, i love it but its so long. With long novels i have monthssss of inactivity before i get back to them. Taking away my viewership. Dunno if others do the same.

 

Well, I do the same, but also because of the repetition in this type of long novel, like emperor domination where the story is all about going to a new world and humiliating everyone again and again

 

And just thought about something else, couldnt a lot of the views on aggregators be bots? If they're paid ad money or something per page view, i wouldnt be surprised if they botted.

 

My disciple is luckily one of the most well crafted and least repetitive chinese novels I have read.

I'm running off to read the end now actually o7

 

Does the season have anything to do with it? Perhaps more people are going outside now that it’s summer and reading less? Just a (probably wrong) thought.

 

Couldn't it simply be that this is infact a niche market, with much of the appeal being from having a free source of unique stories from previously unheard of genres? Now that market is risking becoming somewhat oversaturated and its loosing its appeal? Personally, I devoured the WNs at first, but now the thought of starting another xianxia story when I haven't read all the chapters of the ones I am still reading is unappealing.

Also, with sites like RRL I can read essentially the same genres and themes introduced in JN, CN, and KNs (dungeon core, isekai, harem, empire building) but written and not translated. Come to think of it, I've also picked up more books off of Amazon lately rather than more new series.

 

Also to add, we need new innovative authors.

And I don't expect to see one from Qidian amytime soon. Surprise me, authors.

 

ehh, the more I read, the less I am impressed, then again I was never the target demographic, and 5 years after I started reading I have gotten even further out of the demographic. I imagine that's what we are experiencing here.

 

Oversaturation of Chinese Novels? After all most novels translated nowadays are CN. You read spoonful portions of arrogant young master, jade skinned beauty or heaven defying luck mc - in redundant, filler like chapters - daily. At some point you just had enough of it and 2 months later you forgot to pick up your novels.
I remember back then I read every novels from ww, gt and volare and this year I only visit ww to read KR novels.

Edit: like nuffians, reader came and gone.

 

Yes, views are down across the board. I think it's a combination of over-saturation (too many of the same kinds of novels) and reader fatigue, and yeah, just not much outreach. The majority of views on WW are concentrated in a handful of novels, so althrough the overall numbers are high, only a fraction of the novels are enjoying that readership. Though WW still is hands-down the leader in terms of viewership.

Wuxiaworld's Facebook, on the contrary to what you said, is actually rarely updated. There's been a few posts recently due to specific events such as novels ending and CD ebook release, but before that there have been very few updates aside from a small surge in April and May which is because I was the one updating it then (voluntarily; that wasn't one of my duties). volare has much more frequent updates, it just has a much lower number of likes/followers.

Little marketing? Yeah. As of the end of June when I left WW, not a single dollar had been spent on marketing/outreach. And yes, publication focus has been mostly in China; baffled me why Ren spends so much time catering to people in China who aren't actually reading our content or contributing to the growth of the community, but whateva. He was rarely around anyway, so it's kind of a question mark just what he's been up to. Wuxiaworld is the very definition of resting on one's laurels. It had a lot of readers from the start due to the sudden explosion of the webnovel phenomenon, and has been coasting on that ever since.

So yeah, expanding readership is important. Not easy to do. Ebook releases will help with this some; still too early to tell how much it will expand the community. volare has been partnering with Chinese drama sites and has seen some boosts from that.

Aggregators have an effect but it's hard to know how much. They've always been around but the past year or so viewership has definitely declined. Webnovel added too many new novels too soon, that's part of it. And lack of variety I think is part of it too. Eventually people get tired of reading the same thing over and over. I dunno about WW because I'm not there anymore, but volare has recently been rebounding in terms of views. I dunno if this is a sign of a trend or not.

 

Well expect viewership from long Chinese novels with 5000+ and ongoing to steadily go down since you won't see the end in sight whereas Korean novels give some fresh ideas different from JPN and CN, but there are only quite a few really good ones with proper translations.

 

well you have to keep in mind that webnovel readers usually "evolve" from people watching anime (with a reading manga substep possible). So only a small percentage of people in other countries get into it.
for example in my first year in university my "class" had 270 people, (50 people never showed up to class so idk about them) out of all those people i've only seen 3 others that read webnovels and 1 of those only reads western novels so idk if that one counts.

 

Personally I will not visit Q. I will look else where online or see if it is on a torrent site to download as an epub or pdf, if I can't get a novel I am interested in reading I will just move onto something else. There a millions of free novels out there to read, I am not going to get hung up on one or two novels. Also I don't like that Q. censors novels according to Chinese rules, I started off reading God of Slaughter and it was 'hardcore' but then went softer than vanilla ice-cream. I was shocked at how it suddenly got censored and got over the novel pretty quickly when I released that it wouldn't get back it's lost content.