And the most popular genre on Chyoa is . . .

Since I am fighting some major allegories, and don't want to do any real work, so I thought it would be interesting to list the various categories by number of stories in that genre. The results are . . .

1,518 - Fan Fiction
1,284 - Fantasy
1,230 - Erotic Couplings
1,161 - Science Fiction
943 - Incest
929 - Non-English (dated)
760 - Mind Control
751 - BDSM
710 - Fetish
508 - Exhibitionist & Voyeur
361 - Miscellaneous
350 - Non-Consent
346 - Teen
292 - Cheating Spouses
244 - Gay
192 - Lesbian
189 - Transsexual
176 - Interracial
148 - Romance
136 - Humor & Satire
130 - Swinging
112 - Group Sex
93 - Mature
80 - MILF
64 - Bisexual
56 - Non-Erotic
15 - Toys & Masturbation

Things I found interesting . . .
* I wish "Humor & Satire" was higher but that category is probably the hardest to write well.
* I had to laugh and feel sorry that "Toys" polls lower than "Non-Erotic" on a porn site.
* Personally, I don't get why "Incest" is so high, that would make an interesting cultural study.

Finally, I would love to see the ability to pick more then one category for a story, or maybe a major and minor category. For example, my newest story "Sex, Love and D&D" is Romance, Fantasy and lite BDSM. After looking at these results I am switching it from Romance to Fantasy (because I am a shameless like-whore.)

 

Would be interesting to see how this stacks up with likes/of say the top ten most liked stories (for example the most liked MILF Story would be above the most liked Swinging Story). Of course, that would require a lot of time and effort.

From experience, I've found Swinging to be the least popular (Aphrodite BnB) and BDSM to be the most popular (Taming the Dom).

I have two theories:

1. It's taboo but in a way, it's vanilla (two people fucking).
2. I've always wondered if the popularity Game of Thrones has popularized incest a bit more.

To be fair, I think it'd be pretty hard to write a story completely driven around masturbation.

 

We could try and determine which kind is more popular by likes... but that might prove to be biased in favor of the ones with the most stories.

 

Oh, that sounds like a challenge. ;-)

Hmm, I wouldn't call it "vanilla" and I wonder if GoT is driving it, or the kink is driving GoT.
I guess I was surprised it polled higher then the LGBT stuff, which is all the rage in Western society today, while incest is hardly mentioned, which I guess means it is more of a taboo?

 

Well, it has been OFFICIALLY banned by major companies online, so... there's the whole "Forbidden Fruit" aspect.
If a big porn company CONSTANTLY has to make a big deal about the step-thing, there's going to be a lot of clamour for written word that plays it "Straight" as it were.

I mean, I write pretty close to vanilla as it gets, but it falls into a lot of differing categories. I even kinda "Deconstruct' the category I'm in in my story, so... I have no idea why things are popular or not. I just write here, man...

 

Well you could go by top ten most liked stories (Apologies if I made any errors):

Sci-Fi: 282,129 Likes* *(This includes The Gamer Chyoa Addition which is by far the most popular story on this site.)
Mind Control: 179, 479‬ Likes
Incest: 101,690 Likes
Teen: 97,766 Likes
Fantasy: 85,176‬ Likes
Erotic Couplings:84,286 Likes
Sci-Fi(Without The Game Chyoa Addition) : 81,651 Likes
Fetish: 69,868 Likes
Fan Fiction: 64,962‬ Likes
Exhibitionist: 43,388 Likes
Trans: 36,370‬ Likes (Granted, the story runt of the little is about half of those likes by itself)
Misc. : 35,666 Likes
BDSM: 30, 381 Likes
Non-Consent: 29,275 Likes
Group Sex: 26,089 Likes (Granted The Afterparty is about half of those)
Cheating: 23,090‬ Likes
MILF: 15,957‬ Likes
Interracial: 11,674 Likes
Gay: 11,470 Likes
Bisexual: 10,954 Likes
Non-English (Dated): 9,317 Likes
Humor: 7,386 Likes
Lesbian: 7,296 Likes
Romantic: 5,762 Likes
Mature: 4,036‬ Liks
Swinging: 3,256 Likes
Non-Erotic: 476 Likes (274 of those being from the CHYOA Guide)
Toys and Masturbation: 438‬ Likes

Not a perfect measure of popularity as it doesn't account for favorites, views, bookmarks but is still interesting.

 

It'ss interesting that BDSM and Non-Con are almost exactly smack dab in the middle on both lists.

However, I'm curious where Incest falls on the list, as I am having trouble finding it. I've noticed that while incest probably is somewhere near the middle or top middle, I suspect it has the power to rapidly attract a lot of likes.

 

Must've forgot to add it in:

Incest was 101,690 Likes

List has been updated.

 

Oh wow, When judged by likes Incest is easily in the Top 3. Yep. Incest is definitely a power house.

Well, one thing is for sure, looking at the categories makes me wanna see some of the less popular categories get merged. the LGBT categories are similar enough in content that they could probably be merged, just to give them some needed consolidation in exposure.

 

I would to love to be able to put a story under multiple categories! I constantly cross genres within one story. Maybe limit it to the top three most applicable genres though, just so every story isn't published under every category to attract the most views.

 

By "Incest is Vanilla" I mean compared to other 'out of the ordinary' genres such as Non-Con, Mind Control (The step-cest of Non-con), BDSM, Fetish, etc. I feel most incest stories are really written along the lines of 'two people who shouldn't be together get together' which to me seems to be a pretty big trope in modern drama shows. Incest is just the more extreme version of that. (Disclaimer: I am not into Incest stories)

As for LGBT, I'm going to wager that maybe that kind of community sticks together. Sure, LGBT support is all the rage, but that doesn't mean people are LGB or T or into LGBT erotica.

Ehh, I disagree. I'm not into gay or trans but I don't mind me some lesbian stuff now and then.

 

Comparing the number of likes of stories doesn't make much sense to me without taking account of the number of total chapters ("negatively") and the depth ("positively.")

 

I agree, it would be good to see at a glance the average likes per chapter for both authors themselves and stories. I know the math is easy enough but it would be handy to have it there alongside the other stats.

 

I love this thread, I fret endlessly about the category I've put my stories in because they cover BDSM, incest, non-con, lesbian, romance, humor (to a point) and probably more.

After starting out in erotic couplings I switched to incest and the likes doubled straight away. To be fair incest is not a genre I was interested in or even gave much thought to. I couldn't be bothered to do all the counting that you guys have done,(fair play to you, nice one!) so guessed that fantasy and fan fiction were popular, but they're not my thing by a long way, incest and bdsm were next most popular (I was guessing). I flipped a coin and went for incest, I was lucky and got a good response. I'd never put anything in Erotic couplings again, I just didn't get the exposure, but maybe that's just me.

 

Incest is slightly more main stream than I realized. I was surprised to learn that it is legal in France, Spain and other countries, even in Ireland although only between same sex siblings!

 

(I think the image isn't working Dansak) That actually makes quite a bit of sense, especially when you consider that royalty in Europe and Asia often had incestual marriages of one form or another.

Kind of a darn shame that so many porn companies and website hosts squick at it.

So if you are writing exclusively for popularity, you want your story to be in incest or mind-control... even though it might make more sense to put it in another catagory.

 

Thanks Durzan!
I've given up with the pic! If anyone's interested google 'countries where incest is legal' and the map is top of the list.

 

This is what did it for me. The scene where Jaime and Cersei get it on in the tower triggered something in my head. Next thing I know, I'm reading stories in the category all of the time. This led to fantasizing and creating my own scenarios in my head. Now I'm actually writing.

 

Well, I'm still in favor of a "Likes per unique views" stat

 

Well of course there's a lot more that goes into popularity than just likes. Favorites, views, bookmarks, and comments are all worth taking into consideration, but even then, I doubt there is a perfect method of determining popularity.

For example:

Within 4 months, Tamming the Dom (BDSM) has received near the same amount of views hat School Drop Off (MILF) did over a period of a year (about 80,000 difference, but TtD is catching up), however:

-SDO has over 1000 more likes
-Then again SDO has 155 more chapters than TtD. SDO is also deeper thread wise (78, to TtD's 66)
-TtD also has the highest amount of likes on one chapter (79 to 67)
-Second highest on each would be 50 (TtD) and 39 (SDO)

There's probably more to it than that, but I think its simple to say that there's no perfect way of judging popularity.

As I've said before, the best advice I can give is that seeing as you're writing for free, write what you want