Without a doubt, this is probably the most challenging environment we've ever had to operate in for data when it comes to the Warrior Nun campaign. Not because of the strikes or the news (or lack thereof) about the upcoming trilogy, but because of the platforms themselves.
Thanks to the absolutely disastrous changes occurring at the company formerly known as Twitter, our ability - and all shows who are trying to campaign for renewals - to see what's happening is blinded. We can't tell if the campaign itself is losing momentum, or if it's a data problem - but we strongly suspect the latter.
Here's why. Generally speaking, search and social media content for a popular topic tend to march in lockstep. When people are talking about something, they naturally go to search for it.
If you were to go look at the social media data for the campaign, you could be forgiven for thinking everything's over. Last week, we hit a campaign low of 37K social posts. It's over, right? Well... not exactly. If we take a step back and look at search data, what we see is this:
Search volume around our show is at 4% of peak volume. Now, for context, the last time it was around that volume was back in early May...
...when social media volume was around 445K per day.
What? How can that be? How can we have the same search volume but almost no social volume? The answer is to mostly blame X's management for imploding the service and causing many users to flee. And in that flight, users - people like you and me - have gone elsewhere. Instagram. Blue Sky. Mastodon. Threads. Tiktok. Discord. Those hundreds of thousands of participants are still active, just in different places, and critically, today's social media monitoring tools cannot monitor most of those places.
Before its ruin, Twitter was the global water cooler because, unique among social networks, it shared its data freely. As a result, every social media monitoring platform on the market heavily - perhaps too heavily - relied on Twitter's data for judging influence and activity. The current crop of new platforms like Threads and Blue Sky offer no such data, no such information, so we have no way to extract and quantify where people have gone or what they're saying.
However, based on search volume, it would appear that our fandom and our interest in our show remains healthy - just untrackable in the current situation. And we know this from multiple data sources. Last month, 52 new fanfics for the Avatrice ship were loaded to Archive Of Our Own, an INCREASE from August:
What does this mean for you, for us? Keep doing what you're doing. Keep participating in whichever places you've ended up, sharing, and staying close to the friends you've made in the community. Stay tuned to WarriorNun.com for updates and news from the fandom, as well as the OCS Newsletter and this Substack.
Speaking of which, go check out this fantastic read of a mom's journey into the Warrior Nun fandom!
Please share and recommend this newsletter to fellow Halo Bearers!
Last Week's Data
All data below is as of 23:00 UTC-0.
Let's check in our our delulu-meter, looking at what posts Simon and Dean have made.
Last month, Simon made 6 and Dean made 38.
Last week, we hit 37K in social posts.
Last week, there were 17 key articles and 58 mentions.
Around the Fandom
The Warrior Nun fandom sold 304 Haloed Art books and raised US$2,466 for the nonprofit Covenant House!
https://www.warriornun.com/blog/2023/10/1/haloed-art-fanart-book-for-charity-update
The Warrior Nun fandom raised EU1,250 (US$1,320) for the MIT Trans Identity Movement for Sylvia De Fanti's birthday project:
https://twitter.com/ocsnewsletter/status/1706337911275212992
Connect with the fandom on Blue Sky:
https://twitter.com/halobearerblue/status/1706715370772475936
The Avatrice Big Bang is still open for registration:
https://twitter.com/AvaTriceBigBang/status/1693473000601882910
An interview thread with WN Taiwan:
https://twitter.com/WarriorNunTW/status/1704318830120689977
Thanks to your votes, Ava Silva was rated the #14 bisexual icon by LesboCine:
https://twitter.com/lesbocine/status/1708252475252170939
Stay In Touch
This Week's News
A reminder: One of the major aims of the campaign was to get more mainstream media coverage. Mainstream media publishers don’t care about retweets - they make their money on page views and even compensate writers based on how many people read their articles. The more we help them, the more they help cover us.
Please click on the link to these news articles and scroll to the bottom of each article. You don’t have to read it or hang out after you’ve scrolled to the bottom unless you want to.