That's the number of submissions in my FA feed which are advertisements.

I've had an anecdotal sense that I was seeing a lot of ads for YCHs and such, but no data, so on a lark, a few weeks ago I started keeping track. I categorized every entry in my feed as either an "advertisement" or "actual art". Advertisements I classified as anything intended to induce someone to buy a product (YCH ads, art packs, etc.) or media announcements (now accepting commissions, streaming now, etc.). I only included submissions, not journals.

I don't watch a TON of artists, but I have about a hundred in my list. Over the course of collecting data, I found 119 ads and 190 pieces of actual art.

That comes out to a rate of about 38.5%. I checked a few times throughout, and that ratio actually held true within a percentage point or two throughout the entire scope of collection.

For comparison's sake, modern television runs from about 30% to 32% advertisements on average. That is a considerably higher number than back in the 50s (average 13% advertisement time) all the way up until the 90s, where it broke 20% for the first time.

Does this mean anything? I don't know. No one likes proliferation of advertisements in any media format, and that includes me, and that includes FA. Artists need to make a living, sure. Does making a living require devoting thirty-eight percent of your bandwidth to marketing? I also don't know. Ravager doesn't advertise, and it's doing pretty well so far - is that an exception to the rule? Do video games operate on different rules from visual art?