I woke up feeling like reheated death this morning, and because I had almost no pay work to do and was not in sufficient condition to do story work, I ended up spending an hour or so on an informative but otherwise totally unproductive digression.

I've had this at the back of my head off and on for months now, but it's kicked into especially high gear by Iain's recent travails. We're having trouble figure out exactly who Iain's audience on DA is, what they want to see, and/or what they're mutating into. Posts that were of the type that would reliably have gotten traffic a year ago are falling on their face now, while other posts that normally wouldn't do squat have come out of nowhere and crossed a thousand views in no time flat. It's a mystery.

A perpetual issue with DA's statistics page is that they use rolling stats -- their idea of "stats for this month" or "stats for this year" changes every day, because "month" is actually something like "past thirty days," and once a post rolls off the one-year window, the stats page will no longer take it into account at all. So if you want to find out how many views a post has gotten in its entire life, there is only one way: look at the post. And if you want to do a comprehensive look across all your posts, the only way is to page through them all and check the numbers on each.

Mind you, I'm not high traffic by any means. I have, as of this writing, 1142 posts on DA, and that goes back about six and a half years; my first post was at the end of February in 2020. I post a few things a month. It was completely within the realm of possibility for me to page through every single one of my items in a reasonable timespan.

So I did, and I learned a number of things.

First and foremost, I learned that unlike Iain, my audience is extremely predictable.

I'm not saying that DA is full of misogynists. Yes, there are some folks there who definitely and obviously get off on doing horrible things to women. These are usually pretty easily spotted, though, and the matter is a lot more complex. Some folks -- a surprising number -- do nasty things to women in their images and stories, or read/like images and stories where nasty things happen to women, because they are fundamentally male submissives who are projecting themselves into those situations. If you don't believe me, let me point you to my huge body of such work where I get comments explicitly that say "I wish that were me," usually in so few words.

I myself make stories and images where horrible things happen to women considerably more often than I make horrible things happen to men, not just because I do the sub-projection thing myself, but because I just don't like working with male characters and I don't think I write men particularly well. Men, in general, are very rare in my stories, and when I do have a prominent male character there's a better-than-average chance he'll be a female character by the end of the story. That's just how I roll, and I make no secret of it.

Anyway, the point is, the posts of mine which have done the best, with very few exceptions, are single images with something obviously being done to a female character in them. It's gotta be visible in the panel, because the DA audience mostly doesn't read, and if you put words or a story below the image, they'll never look at them. So panels where the Thing Being Done is a "you need to use your imagination or read the text to find out" don't do as well. DA does not do implication. You have to make it blatant.

Interestingly, even though a lot of people use DA as a titty bar, posts I've made which are just Hot Woman Looking Hot without any transformations or other Things Being Done don't do nearly as well. My audience doesn't want tits -- well, they don't want just tits. They want women being turned into robots or dolls or mind-controlled or what-have-you -- that is what they know me for, and that is what they expect -- and they want it in easy-to-access format and they want it too obvious to miss.

The "easy-to-access" part is important because most of my best work, the long-format comics, are posted as PDFs, and I've known for years that PDFs have a bar to entry. You need a big screen to see them well at the size I use, and the Firefox PDF handler in particular doesn't work on mobile devices at all. Even on a big screen in DA in Firefox, what you see when you come in cold is the upper quarter of the first page, and I have a tendency to not put any of the most interesting content in that portion on purpose ... because you have to scroll down to see the dirtier stuff, and the bluenoses seldom will, they are less likely to try to do malicious reporting. So passers-by don't necessarily know there is anything fun lurking further down, and many of them won't try to look.

This bias against the PDFs is why I try, about a week after the PDF comes out, to find good/interesting single panels from that story and post a handful of them as individual images -- to give the non-PDF folks something to look at. I've been doing this for years, and as we'll see, in general the single images do better on DA -- often far better -- than the PDF did.

Even the relatively-recently-added multi-image posts (you are shown them one at a time, and must page between them, but it's a single post) or my comic-style single posts (one big image, but it's broken into panels like a comic) don't do as well as plain, single images. With the multi-page sets, people just often don't bother to look at more than the first image, and since I use these for image sequences, that means they don't see the punchline. With the comic-style pages, the problem is that they first see the thumbnail DA creates for the post, which has to shrink down the entire page so much that you can't actually tell what it is, and people don't bother to come in to find out. With one of my typical 1000x1000 single panels, even the tiny thumbnail gives you a reasonably good guess at what the actual image looks like.

(I can't go too hard about laziness on the viewer's part. It's more complicated than that. DA is horrible on mobile, and actively, deliberately, makes it difficult to, say, look through someone's gallery -- it's set up for a vertical stream of recent/recommended posts and doesn't work well at doing anything else. I don't use DA on mobile; I like big screens and I cannot lie. My stats claim that the majority of my regular visitors are on desktop clients, not mobile, but even so, the mobile experience of DA is horrible enough that I can't just write it off as "these people are lazy.")

The threshold for the list that's coming below was whether something has gotten at least 10K views. This is an arbitrary cutoff, obviously, but a good one, because what I noticed as I looked through the pages was that there are definitely some plateaus.

These days, pretty much anything I post does at least 1K views. That's the minimum threshold for success -- if a post doesn't do at least 1K I tend to think it's a failure. The actual threshold for success is probably a bit higher these days, as I collect a larger and larger number of "regulars" (and also, I suspect, as people become more and more desperate for content on DA that's not generative -- but that's a story for another day). There's a second tier that is 3-4K views and that is where the majority of my stuff posted, say, within the last two years eventually lands.

There's a third tier that's about 6-8K. These are the posts that I consider to have done really well. But crossing 10K is elite. My list has ninety-two items on it, so about eight percent of my posts have made it into the 10K Club. It's also important that this is cumulative over time ... if something passes 10K it doesn't just mean that it did well when I first posted it, but that people keep finding it, that they're taking the trouble to dig back through my archives (which, I reiterate, DA makes almost impossible to do on mobile) and find it, sometimes years after the fact.

And it is absolutely not true that the numbers tend to go up over time, that older pieces all have higher view counts than newer ones. In fact, the older stuff mostly does not get the same attention that newer stuff does, because my audience has steadily grown over time in a small way, and many of those folks aren't looking at old stuff. If a post made in, say, the Hotel Eleusis era has managed to cross 10K, that really means something.

Mostly this list does what you would, in hindsight, expect; as I say, it turns out the audience is predictable. But there are a few surprises. For some time now I have been claiming that "Overdraft" (a single-image comic-style post) is my best seller on DA, at 30K views. I now have to revise that; it's my most-viewed comic-style post. There are several single images which have blown it out of the water, and the record-holder just about gave me a heart attack from shock.

Again, I don't actually propose you read this list. You have no reason to care. If you do know something about my post history on DA (which is to say, if you're Iain) you might find some interesting facts and enjoyable snarky observations in here; but for everyone else, I think it's probably a very dull ride. It is mostly here for me to come refer to later.

These are in descending chronological order; that is, we're starting with the newest.

Opposition (PDF) - an involuntary TGTF
Male-to-female transformation of various flavors has a large permanent hard core on DA and will never not be intensely popular. (Men, conversely, are generally box office poison on DA unless they become women. You draw your own conclusions. Even the few times I've done F2M it has been pretty much shunned.) This one hit 10K fast and will likely become an all-time champion, partly because the PDF's thumbnail image has an unmissibly blatant image of a woman clearly in the process of receiving mind control of some kind.
In Maintenance Bay SE73 - woman to robot
Reformatting (multi-image) - woman to robot
Co-Rabbitation (PDF) - Easter story of people becoming bimbo bunnies, including M2F
Project 2000 (comic style, multi-image) - women transformed and mind-controlled
Escape-Proof - woman to alien/monster
This image has an accompanying story in the text, but I have doubts that most DA folks bothered to read it, and were just attracted to a picture of a woman looking horrified to discover that she now has a tentacle for a tongue.
Succ-u-bus - woman to monster
Josie in Eeli's Loop (multi-image) - woman to sex doll
These are panels from Sleeper Squad 56. I knew they'd do well because this is the "money" sequence in that story -- the part they'd page through the PDF to get to without reading any of it.
Collectivized (multi-image) - woman dehumanized/droned/controlled
Dupli-Kate vs Aliens
This is an odd exception -- a single panel from Sleeper Squad 55, it does what it says; it's Dupli-Kate's seven identical selves (she really should have been called Septi-Kate, but that would ruin the joke) in a street fight with some aliens with ray guns. No kink in it whatsoever.
Instruction Phase - woman being mind-controlled
Eyebot's New Improved Plan (multi-image) - women droned/mind-controlled
A sequence taken from Sleeper Squad 54, which undoubtedly did well because the lead/thumbnail image, of ranks of women standing at attention in orange bodysuits wearing giant-eyeball helmets, caught everyone's attention.
Unreliable Resources (PDF) - Sleeper Squad 53
Subdued - woman to robot/drone (single panel from SS 52)
Experimental Detention (multi-image) - woman dehumanized/droned
The Slice is Right (comic style) - women transformed to various inanimate objects
... and light cannibalism by implication. I dunno. And I don't know how this crossed 10K because it's impossible to even make out what's going on from the thumbnail.
Feedback (PDF) - robot women, woman to robot
It amazes me that this has crossed 10K, but it DOES have a thumbnail image of Irene (a robot woman), and Indigo (another robot woman) is prominent "above the fold" in the PDF. So that probably explains it. Robot women do well on DA even when there's no transformation or mind control.
Ducks In a Row - women to ducks (single panel from SS 48)
Encountering the New Model - women to robots, see "Altered Status" below
A Goo'd Kisser - goo woman making other goo women
H80s - robot women
OK, beginning transmission now - woman being mind-controlled/robotized
These two are panels from "The Overthrow," a story which on DA is hindered by having to be in the pay-to-view area (it's only a buck, but even so). "H80s" has 12K, and "OK, beginning transmission now" has 14+K. None of the twenty-six individual locked pages of "The Overthrow" has reached 1K; they average about 350 views. (You can't post PDFs in the locked area.) It's a shame; this is one of my favorite stories, though it is admittedly very dark.
South by Southeast (PDF) - Sleeper Squad 44
We Got Trashed Last Night (comic-style) - women to garbage bags (!)
Hrrkh! - woman being transformed
Specifically, a panel from SS 37 of Cres reacting in horror to the fact that she now has a tentacle for a tongue. See also "Escape-Proof." I'm not calling anybody out, but apparently if you can depict that they are reacting in horror to whatever's happening to them, it adds to the appeal for various folks.
Gree (comic style) - Cute alien virtual woman
My favorite scene from "Moist Effect," reposted by itself more than a year after the original story, and which has done nearly four times the traffic of the original. SIGH.
The Patrol (Clean Version) - women drones/robots
The uncensored version is the rare single image that had to go into the pay-to-view area, and it has only done 2K views.
Evading Pursuit (comic style)
Four panels from SS 36 which show how one of the characters changes her appearance and clothing to disguise herself as she walks. I put this out before SS 36 as a tech demo, with text discussing how it was done in Studio, and I suspect (since the image itself is completely innocuous) that makes this the very rare post that has crossed 10K purely due to technical interest from the other Studio-using artists on DA. I do have a small "inside baseball" set of regulars.
Recruitment (comic style, kinda) - woman to alien
Closed In (comic style, kinda) - woman droned/mind-controlled
These two are sequences of side-by-side images. These days I might have made them multi-image posts instead. "Closed In," which depicts a dazed-looking woman gradually being dressed in a head-enclosing helmet/apparatus, is in the ultra-elite 20+K views club. I attribute this partially to the fact that the thumbail uses the best part of the image.
Wait, no - woman to robot (implied)
This was one of the heart-attack shocks. While I wasn't paying attention, this image taken from SS 34 -- which depicts a woman looking up in horror at a robotic facemask/helmet that is being lowered onto her head -- has done 63+K views. This is a repost of the same panel that's used as the thumbnail for SS 34 itself ... which either makes this more surprising or less (see below), I can't decide which.
I bet that feels good - woman turned to stone (single panel from SS 34)
The Program (PDF) - Sleeper Squad 34
The only PDF of any kind to cross 20K (so far), "The Program" probably owes some of its success (25K) to its many robotizations, and some to that thumbnail image, which, as seen above, also did box office when it was shown all by itself.
April Fools - women to clowns/jesters
Blank - woman presumably mind-controlled
I said the transformation or effect needs to be blatant enough to be visible even from thumbnail range, but there are exceptions. This is an image of a woman wearing headphones, a visor, and some kind of chip or implant on her forehead, with a serenely empty expression on her face. It stands currently at 21+K views.
How To Make a Goblin - man to goblin
Multiple figures in the same scene showing the progress/sequence. Done as a process test, with explanatory text, and thus also may fall into the "crossed 10K via the Studio nerds" category. Certainly I can't think of any other reason a MALE transformation (and yes, he stays male) would ever place.
Leo Gets His. Hers. - man to, um, well ...
A panel from SS 29. Leo gets a vagina in place of his facial features. He also gets breasts, though, and between that and the title I think we can probably safely call this a M2F.
Altered Status (comic style) - man to female robot
A sequence done as an add-on/epilogue to part of "Fun Size Nightmares," this piece has done better than the original story, though it also made the list. The segment of "Fun Size Nightmares" this was an add-on to, involving people being converted involuntarily into silver robots, was the clear favorite of the anthology. Two years later, when I did a single image of an old-model silver robot alongside a newer one, it too placed easily in this list ("Encountering the New Model," above). I dunno what it is with the robot women. I think Hajime Sorayama broke a lot of brains.
Fun Size Nightmares (PDF) - Hallowe'en anthology story, many transformations
Turned upon by her creations - woman attacked by robots (single panel from SS 28)
Melinda Is a Doll - woman to sex doll (single panel from SS 28)
Both of these have done better than "Mothers" itself, but the latter has nothing to be ashamed of. It helps that it has a thumbnail which suggests the levels of sheer weirdness that are buried near the very end of the story, and cues the passer-by that there's something there worth having a look at.
Mothers (PDF) - Sleeper Squad 28
Fashion Ball - women in inflating clothing
Overdraft (comic style) - man to woman, semi-involuntary (see remarks above)
Complexity (PDF) - Sleeper Squad 27
I attribute the success of this one, again, to the thumbnail, which depicts a woman in the process of transforming into a dog.
BSoD - woman (me!) being mind-controlled and roboticized
One panel of a woman staring emptily and slack-mouthed at nothing, apparently partly enclosed in some kind of circuitry or equipment, with an implant in her forehead dangling cables, wearing glasses which have the Windows bluescreen of death image shown or reflected in them. 20+K and counting. I did this image in about a half an hour one afternoon as stress relief for a bad computer day, and it kind of annoys me when the hasty, half-assed shit does well. But apparently it speaks to a lot of people. I considered using it as my DA avatar for a while, but at that size you can't tell what's going on.
The New Arrival - woman in mild bondage
Robot Tests Pt 3
Robot Tests Pt 2
Robot Tests Pt 1
These are literally test images I used to compare various robot models in Studio. Each image has eight to ten figures in it, standing in a row with no backdrop or anything. There is absolutely no story or any other compelling reason for these images to get views. It's the robot women, I tell you. DA is not normal on the topic of robot women.
ReVamp (PDF) - men to women, implied mind control, mayhem
C'mon, Trilby, just show us the TGTF Stuff
The image is just a "read the text below" placeholder. This post has 41+K, but it doesn't count because I link it from my main page as an index/help page. On the other hand, there's another page I also link from there, a different index, and it's only got about 5K, so we'll chalk it up to the perpetual interest in TGTF and its searchability by those four letters.
This one's going to be a lot of fun to mess with - man to woman, mind-control
A single image from "ReVamp," the only single to do this kind of numbers, even though I like "Oh goodness, what perversions do they intend?" much better.
Lovell Encapsulated - woman in diabolical machine
A single image from "Moist Effect." Like reposting "Gree" later, did much better than the actual story. There's another single, "Distress Call," which is a much better image, and one of my all-time favorites, but since it doesn't have a Woman In A Situation ... SIGH.
Melinda's Ghosts (PDF) - Sleeper Squad 25
Dire Straits (Straitjacket Test) - test image, women in various straitjackets, like it says
Mars Needs Bimbos (PDF)
I think this may be the only time where something crossed 10K just on the basis of its title. It really does tell you everything you need to know.
Bad Hare Day (PDF) - Easter story, people to bunnies (Playboy style), mayhem
Unexpected Changes To the Syllabus (comic style, sorta) - woman bimboizing
The first four panels of "Bad Hare Day" as a separate post.
Conspiracy of the Ball-Jointed Dolls
A test image of several different figure kits/approaches for making ball-jointed dolls, with discussion. At 22+K it's difficult to tell whether this got here because of the Studio nerdery or because of the doll kinksters. Could be both.
The Palace of Rubies (Part 1) - Sleeper Squad 18
This has twice the views of Part 2. One possible reason is that this one has an image of naked Ruby visible "above the fold" in the PDF - possibly the only time I've ever placed nudity right up there in the top row.
Bioproxy (PDF) - man to woman
I'm really glad "ReVamp" and "Bioproxy" are on this list because they are possibly my two favorite long comic stories I've done, and I like when other people read them.
She Got Carded - woman to, well ...
Here it is, folks, the shocker of the list. This tech-demo image of a woman being reduced to a flat stand-up display, a cutout figure like you might see used as an advertisement or in a movie-theatre lobby, has somehow gotten 75+K views and is our new current champion, for reasons that must remain bewildering.
Fisher Enters the Talon Bar
This is a really beautiful image from "The Fisher Case," SS 13, and I'm glad it made the list ... but it also makes me sad that "The Fisher Case" itself, which I love, did not get appreciated by more people and is only at 2K.
Girl looks way too pleased - woman to store mannequin, basically
Again, pleased this image is at 22+K; less thrilled that "Bliss," SS 12, which it was taken from, remains at 3K.)
Unspoken, Part 2 (PDF) - Sleeper Squad 4
This is the repost of Sleeper Squad 4 as a PDF, six months after the original page-by-page posts (see below). This one leads with images of Euphorics "above the fold," which is probably why it's done so well (part 1, for example, is only at 3+K).
A Little Conditioning - woman being mind-controlled
Wash and Wear (PDF) - man to woman, bimboizing
"A Little Conditioning" is a single image from "Wash and Wear," which has done well mostly because of its TGTF part, which is only the last third of the story. I'll take it.
Triumph of the Dolls
Utilidolls (page 5) (comic style)
Doll Line Test 2
Doll Line Test 1
"Triumph of the Dolls" is a bonus image, not used in the story, from "Utilidolls." This is an image of the various dolls confronting/menacing our two human protagonists. It's not nearly as fun as anything in "Utilidolls," but at 14K it has done better than all but the money page of "Utilidolls" itself (20+K). The page-by-page posts I was using at the time enable people to skip too easily to just the visual good bits without actually bothering to read the story, and the view counts for "Utilidolls" made that abundantly clear. I'm not saying I switched to PDFs just because of that (there are several other advantages for me), but it was certainly a factor. The two Doll Line Test images were, as their names say, tech tests for the story. Note, by the way, that when I reposted "Utilidolls" as a PDF later, it only did 4K.
In the Back Rooms - single image from SS 11
Not those backrooms. This was before those happened. This is an image of a man leaving an assignation with a sex worker; she's lying naked and asleep on the bed behind him. I have no idea why this has done 15K.
Comin' into the club to steal your girl - single image from SS 10
And a really rotten one I should not have posted. This is just an image of Ruby and Leyna in disguise from that story, sitting in a club whose lighting is very, very poor. In fact, it's hard to tell what the image is depicting. Maybe people thought it was racier than it is?
Don't Bother the Bunnies (comic style) - man to (Playboy style) bunny
Parts and Service
Two naked women with penises. This was a tech test, and while it may have attracted 16+K of traffic for the Studio-nerdery discussion (of applying male genitalia to female figures and the challenges of same), somehow I doubt it.
Triumph of the Drones
Sleeper Squad #3 (page 5) (comic style)
OK, so, Sleeper Squad 3 and 4 feature the Euphorics, a cult of hermaphroditic people who wear fully-enclosing, sensory-deprivation bodysuits with goggles and other facial gear that dehumanizes them. The "money" page of SS 3 has two people in Euphoric suits having sex. "Triumph of the Drones" is an image of Euphorics standing around, lording it over two in front who are kneeling and have presumably been recently converted. Euphorics have been popular on DA. The page-by-page versions of SS 3 and 4 continue to get hits to this day largely because of the Euphorics. By contrast, none of the other pages of any of the Sleeper Squad issues originally posted in page-by-page format has done anything like the 13+K of SS 3 page 5. Most of them are at 1K views per page.
Be my Valentine (page 4) (comic style) - man to virtual woman
The surprise here is that page 4, the final page of the story, has the most views. I would have said that the money page was page 3, where the actual conversion/digitization is depicted.
Sleeper Squad Master Page
Doesn't count because I link it at the bottom of every Sleeper Squad issue, as an index.
Lipnotized 2
Lipnotized 1
There are three images in the "Lipnotized" sequence, and it's a mild surprise that #1, which has a woman femming up a young man (applying makeup, with a wig in one hand ready to go), has done better than #2 which has said young man, now fully femmed, lying on the bed ass-up and eyes closed prepared to receive some anal service from the woman.
Somewhere in Fictionspace 3|2|1
A set of "choose your own path" posts, images with little story segments underneath. Mostly bad ends; everybody really just wants the bad ends. This one, where Our Heroine gets turned into a vibrator, is the only one that has crossed 10K, though there are a few others that have come close.
Putting the Spark Back Into Their Marriage - man and woman to sex dolls
This comes with a little story, but, again, I'm not sure anyone on DA has bothered to read the story.
Somewhere in Fictionspace 0
The start page, which has no kink or anything on it, but since this page is where you have to begin, it's got more views than any of the others.
In the Gender Machine v2
In the Gender Machine v1
We're now down to the Hotel Eleusis period, the earliest (and worst) stuff in my gallery. Not much gets play here (many of the images from this period have never hit 1K, nor do they deserve to). The two variants of "In the Gender Machine" certainly don't deserve to, and yet here they are in the top ten -- v2 with 51+K and v1 with 42+K. Note that it is impossible to tell the gender of the person in the gender machine, on purpose, but I guarantee you that ninety-eight percent of the people who have come to see these images choose to interpret it as a M2F transformation.
Not Necessarily a Bad End - From Hotel Eleusis (woman in mind-control chair)
The Erasing Room - woman in mind-control chair
Bad End: Clowned - From Hotel Elusis
Bad End: Doll (Type 1) v2 - From Hotel Eleusis
Barbie-type doll, complete with box. v2 because there's an earlier version that is not as good (and has not done 22+K like this one). "Type 1" because there is also a sex-doll transformation that is Type 2.
Clowns - From Hotel Eleusis