Hottest Fic Clicks & other miscellanea

Do you ever glance at the “Hottest Clicks” for this site? They’re usually pretty opaque — if they lead to a page on the Petulant Poetess or An Archive of Our Own, for example, you’ll see the domain, but the individual page will just be identified by numbers.

To help you decipher these links, here are the most popular fic clicks for the past 90 days on the Petulant Poetess, An Archive of Our Own, and fanfiction.net.

The Petulant Poetess

1. “An Unexpected Shower”
2. “Invisible Lover”
3. Resolving a Misunderstanding
4. A Holiday with the Headmaster
5. A Long Vernal Season
6. “Heat”
7. An Act of Love
8. “Obliging Minerva”
9. “Lemon Drabbles”
10. “Minerva’s Mistletoe” & Death’s Dominion (tied)

An Archive of Our Own

1. “An Unexpected Shower”
2. “Invisible Lover”
3. “Heat”
4. An Act of Love
5. “Minerva’s Mistletoe”
6. “The Fifth Gryffindor”
7. “Lemon Drabbles”
8. “Obliging Minerva”
9. “A Christmas for Aberforth”

Since I have not been posting to AO3 for very long, and because my primary posting site has been TPP for the last few years, there are far fewer hits to AO3 than to TPP. Every other fic hit to AO3 is a single click-through, so there would be a number of “ties” for tenth place. The first place fic on TPP has more hits than all of my individual stories on AO3 combined.

Fanfiction.net

1. “An Unexpected Shower”
2. “Minerva’s Mistletoe”
3. A Little Holiday
4. “The Fifth Gryffindor”
5. “Lovesick?”

Fanfiction.net doesn’t get many click-throughs for my fics, but every month, a number of visitors click through to some of my fanfic recs that are located there as well as elsewhere.

Besides the fanfic clicks, livejournal gets a lot of click-throughs, particularly to Ensnaring Snape, Close Contrast, and Crack Broom.

Strange Popularity

One rather bizarre statistic: over the last 90 days, the single most-visited post on my blog, and the second most-visited place after the Lemon One-Shots page, is the definition post for maleficium. In fact, it is in second place (to Lemon One-Shots) for the previous 365 days. I find this very strange. The other top dozen or so posts and pages for the same periods are either blog pages with fanfics or fanfic links, or are posts that relate more obviously to what I usually do with this blog (talk about fanfic and fandoms, usually Harry Potter fan stuff).

Back in July 2011 when the Oxford English Dictionary had a “Harry Potter week” with definitions of words related to HP and to witchcraft & wizardry, I provided the basic definition and links to the OED site. “Maleficium” was the third word that week. (The first word of the week was “dumbledore”; the second was “philosopher’s stone.”) Little did I know that there must be legions of people out there from all over the world searching for the meaning of that word! The hits come through search engine results for searches such as “meaning of maleficium” and “maleficum definition,” and for some reason, my blog post must be high on the search engine’s results list. It’s just strange! But I suppose it’s performing a public service of some sort!