Cracking the Wattpad Code: Insider Secrets the Pros don't want you to know!

Algorithm Algorithm Part 2

I've always wanted to do a segment on this, but never had the time or the proper tools in which to perform such an analysis.

Full disclosure: this is more or less a hypothesis built upon observation. It does not, in any way, constitute fact. I don't know any more than any of you about how the rankings work. Part of me does this in the hopes that people smarter than I will contribute and add their two cents to this analysis.

In any case, I do believe there have been some fairly significant changes to the new ranking algorithm. Whether or not they make it better, I will leave up to you.

My personal opinion on the matter, is that the old one was better (for me, LOL!). But this current one is more fair.

Is it perfect? Of course not, there is always room for improvement. Would I change this current algorithm? Maybe not.

I did have a specific fondness for the one before it. I rather thought that the version of YuenRank that preceded this one had it's heart in the right place. This one is, for lack of a better word, more communist than it is democratic, whereas the last one, was far more capitalist, but neither one is worse than the other.

Huh?

Let's just get into it, shall we?

 Here's a sample of the Hot List for Science Fiction as it appears on 3/28/2013"

Name Parts Pages Reads Votes Comments Measured Date Rank

The Gauntlet 31 88 604535 16446 1710 3/28/2014 1

UNE 23 254 126759 3468 387 3/28/2014 2

Risen: Darklight 66 285 1232405 17363 4838 3/28/2014 3

Sigma/Star 110 304 1799285 8058 996 3/28/2014 4

Immortalia 16 59 408408 16823 2447 3/28/2014 5

Children of the Plague 26 73 649896 6823 961 3/28/2014 6

Setting Suns 24 44 115170 1233 422 3/28/2014 7

ATLANTIS 25 116 33954 523 57 3/28/2014 8

Baron Schwiter 18 65 32345 1653 563 3/28/2014 9

Psych Investigation Episodes II 24 123 637294 26653 3234 3/28/2014 10

Silent Heroes: Wildcat 15 28 24962 1406 412 3/28/2014 11

Power Shift 20 51 243521 5074 2187 3/28/2014 12

Selection 25 75 335568 7948 1338 3/28/2014 13

Kuro 95 116 861190 16125 2226 3/28/2014 14

The Trials of the Core 58 154 31655 1238 209 3/28/2014 15

That's a strange wall of meaningless numbers, so let's try and make sense of it all.

As I've said before, Wattpad has particular focus on keeping things FAIR, which in my personal opinion is very good. How exactly do they keep things fair?

Well let's take my book Kuro for instance. It has 95 parts. In theory I have more parts, so I should get more reads. If Wattpad were blind to this, I would be doing pretty well.

But Wattpad is pretty smart. It now acknowledges that a big reason why Kuro does well is BECAUSE IT HAS MORE PARTS. It didn't used to do this, and I admit back in the day, I benefitted a lot from it.

So Wattpad does what I like to call PARITY. It takes an audit of the reads, and scores it based on the number of parts. VERY, VERY FAIR.

So let's run the PARITY algorithm against that group of books again, and divide the total reads by their total parts to equalize them: