We’ve had some writers ask about the relationship between ratings and downloads, so I wanted to do a quick analysis on what writers can expect to see based on the ratings of their script. What I’ll do here is look at how the maximum score a script receives affects how much it’s downloaded.

The first chart looks at reader downloads and shows the max score a given script received and the number of downloads (5th, 25th, median, 75th, 95th percentiles; blue section is the middle 50 percent):

As you can see, industry downloads increase the most starting at 7. Below a score of 7, the median download is still 0. This means that unless you’re getting at least one score of 7 or above, likely you won’t see a ton of downloads.

The below table summarizes the number of industry downloads by max rating:







Max Rating

Median

75th





1

0

0





2

0

0





3

0

1





4

0

1





5

0

1





6

0

1





7

1

3





8

8

14





9

17

34





10

18

53







If you look at all ratings (including industry), you get a similar graph:

It’s important to note that the scale is lower here. This means that a reader scores will likely indicate more downloads — practically speaking, having a posted eval from a positive score likely encourages a download.

I also did a quick breakdown by genre (for the more popular genres). This time, the graph shows the spreads using 8 as a threshold — that is, I included any scripts scoring at least an 8.

It’s fairly consistent across the board when it comes to the median number of downloads, but you do get variation on the top end. Mystery & Suspense and Horror seem to get the highest number of downloads for 8+ scoring scripts.