Some Vocal Statistical Observations

Introduction

I know this will probably be of no interest to a lot of people, whenever I bring these things up with people the lack of interest is almost deafening but I am going to write about it anyway. That is the good thing about platforms like Vocal and Medium is that you can write about virtually anything you choose and it will be published. Whether people will read or not is a different matter, but it is other people’s choice whether to read what you create and produce.

I have written many pieces that according to Vocal have no reads despite having multiple hears and comments, so I have to trust that people actually read and appreciate my work.

Something On The Vocal Communities

Looking at the Vocal Communities that you can see an overview of here and generally there is between a 3:2 to 3:1 story to creator ratio. Poetry has the most stories (almost a hundred thousand) and thirty three thousand creators so the ratio there is 3:1, but I have written over three hundred poems so there must be a lot of creators who have only written a single poem.

Pride is remarkably small with only nine hundred stories and six hundred creators, that is the 3:2 ratio, though I only have three in that community but that is still double the average, though I am a prolific writer.

Some groups have relatively few stories but still fall within the ratio range that I mentioned at the start of this section, I do find it amazing that when you look at statistics things seem to fall into surprisingly static buckets.

Top Story Ratios

I mentioned that Poetry has the most stories, but the probable reason is that a poem can be as little as a hundred words, but I have seen this abused by some creators where they don’t hit the six hundred word minimum so they post it as a poem even though it is not a poem, and unfortunately, Vocal moderation does not seem to pick these up.

The other thing is that fifty per cent of the last twelve Top Stories are poems. They are not bad poems but there are half a million stories on Vocal and poems account for only twenty per cent of them so you maybe would expect the Top Story numbers to reflect that. This means that other communities are being passed over for Top Stories, so are they just not as good as Poetry? I actually know they are and take more work and effort to produce something worth reading especially in Fiction because usually, you have nothing to start from there.

This is probably a passing situation and I would have to look further into Top Stories to see what the overall ratios are but it is something that is being remarked upon by Vocal Cretors.

Some Conclusions

I am not sure how many Vocal Creators there are (This link from last year says it’s over one million) or what their world distribution is, but in the groups where I have access to user data, it is generally 80% from the USA with 15% comprising the UK, Canada and Australia.

Women outnumber men 3:2 probably because they are more creative and about 1% are non-binary.

Age-wise 30% are in the 55-64 age group with 20% over 65, 40% are in the 25-54 age group.

I know this is extremely random but maybe one or two of you will find some interesting picking on here.