Monday I posted Henchman Training Demo on rWritingPrompts. It's just a paraphrase of my day of work, and it doesn't make any sense. It got 101 upvotes so far, making it my second most popular story (the top is Dragons Aren't Real, at 262 upvotes). Getting upvoted on Reddit seems very disconnected from the quality of the story. I've also got all my stories indexed on my webpage. Almost all their traffic there is robot web crawlers, but I think they get actually read at about 1 read per month per story. A few are more popular, specifically the mirror skit gets almost 10 reads per month, probably because it claims to be a scout skit rather than a story.
This made me wonder: what's it take (from a utilitarian persective of giving entertainment to the rest of the world) for writing a story to be worthwhile? Is writing stories worthwhile?
I value my unpaid freetime at about $30/hour, so writing a story should give the world at least $30 of value per hour spent for the world benefit to break even. The average story is 1000 words long and takes 3 hours to write and revise. I timed myself reading, and I read at about 250 words per minute, so 15000 words per hour. People value random entertainment at about $3/hour. They value specific entertainment more, like tickets to a football game, but for entertainment where they know they'll be somewhat entertained but they don't know what they're getting it's about $3/hour.
The view::upvote ratio is very unknown. Imgur had 40::1 and pics had 600::1. Prompts on writingprompts I can see are 600::1, but I don't have any measure of stories. I'm going to guess 40::1.
So:
The same logic goes to my other web pages. I can tell from visitor statistics how often they are viewed. Web crawlers account for around 2 views per month. If the web pages are just something I typed (no additional work that they're just reporting on), it's still 3 hours per 1000 words, a visitor statistic is worth half an entertainment (compared to reddit upvotes which are worth twenty entertainments), so webpages are worthwhile to the world as entertainment if they get over 900 views total. If a page gets 20 views per month, discounting 2 web crawls per month, it'll reach 900 views in 4 years. A few of my pages have definitely made the grade. Most haven't and never will.
There are additional benefits to myself of writing stories, such as the value of entertaining myself by the process of writing and rereading them, and (if I publish them) watching if other people like them. I haven't tried to measure those so far.
Update August 2023. I had thought I was considered a bad writer on rWritingPrompts. But just now I was comparing my statistics to those of other people to prove it. And my perceived quality of their writing vs mine. And, y'know what, I'm not bad. I'm pretty firmly average. Wow!
The above estimate of needing 900 views looks about right from a utilitarian persepctive, but it doesn't earn you any money. If you want to make money off selling books, Kindle Direct Publishing through Amazon charges $2.99 to $9.99 per book and gives the author 35% to 70% royalty. That's say $2 income per book. A book is 80000 words, so at 3 hours per 1000 words, 240 hours of effort. If you want to be paid $30/hour for that effort, you need to sell $30*240/$2=3600 books. 3600 is more than 900. I've seen estimates of 10000 sales for printed books to be worthwhile.
Above I timed myself at 3 hours to write 1000 words and 4 minutes to read them, so writing is 45x slower than reading. But still, 3600 books sold means people out ther are spending 3600/45=80x longer overall reading your book than you spent writing it. That's a huge time sink. Those people could have been working or hiking or sleeping instead. People can choose not to read your book if they don't enjoy it, which would leave you way short of 3600 sales, so if people aren't enthusiastic about reading your book I wouldn't expect to be able to make a living off writing it.
So. The world shouldn't have many authors that make a living off writing. The world just can't afford to spend that many hours reading. I sincerely hope successful writers all have enthusiastic readers, for the readers' sakes.
I may be an average writer, but I can still vouch I haven't found anyone who is enthusiastic about reading what I write. I've got a few relatives who are able to tolerate reading my writing every so often, so long as I don't make too much of a pest of myself. Me being average just means most writers are unsuccessful. So trying hard will NOT get me to profitability. Doing it just for fun when I feel like it even more so shouldn't because I'll write so much less. But having fun does up the chances people would enthusiastically read what little I do write. It also reduces the time I spend on the relatively unproductive activity of writing. So writing only when I feel like it, and having fun with it, sounds like a good approach.