AO3 stats project: fandoms
Next up: a more detailed analysis of fandoms, the engine of fan works everywhere.
The Data | Basic Questions | Fandoms | Tags | Correlations | Kudos | Fun Stuff
Thanks to @eloiserummaging for beta reading these posts; any remaining errors are my own. A Python notebook showing the code I used to make these plots can be found here.
What are the top fandoms on the AO3?
I pulled this data directly from the Archive fandoms pages in mid-March, just to make sure I was comparing work counts on the same day. And, as it happens, I checked about 3 days after BTS pipped Star Wars to become the 10th-biggest fandom on AO3! You may note that there’s significant overlap between some of these fandoms–K-pop and BTS, Marvel and Avengers–but they are classified as different fandoms so I’m preserving that here. (In a technical sense, while there’s significant overlap between Marvel and the Avengers, Marvel has some works Avengers doesn’t and vice versa.) Edit 4/25: in fact, I had a data processing failure and BTS should have been a subfandom of K-pop all along! I’m leaving the plots for now, but worth keeping in mind.
These fandoms aren’t of equal popularity over time:
(The height of the curves are relative within each fandom but not correct between fandoms, by the way. The BTS work count is like ⅓ of the Marvel work count, fore example, but it looks taller because a higher fraction of those works were posted in recent years. Basically, all the colored blocks have the same area, so the ones popular over a short time are also taller.)
RPF and Supernatural are nearly-constant juggernauts, while Marvel rises and falls with movie releases, and K-pop has exploded in the last few years. You can also see release dates of Sherlock series reflected in the Sherlock Holmes tag, and Fantastic Beasts in the Harry Potter tag. (And in the old version of this where Star Wars was the 10th biggest fandom, you could REALLY see The Force Awakens.) Marvel has the biggest single day for any fandom–on Dec 24, 2015, there were (at least) 452 Marvel works posted! In fact, we can look at Marvel in more detail. Here’s Marvel posting rates over time, with the MCU movie release dates overplotted:
Wow–guess we all hated Civil War, lol. In fact, that dip is so big that you can see it on the Archive-wide stats from the previous post–other fandoms had a small dip there, but nothing like Marvel, so it drives most of the decrease you see in mid-2016.
Here’s a fun comparison: the top 10 fandoms by number of works; by total number of hits on all works; and by median hit count per work, for fandoms with at least 1,000 works. Another way to think of this table is: most popular with creators; most popular with readers; and highest reader-to-creator ratio. For an apples-to-apples comparison, I’m using the number of works in my dataset and not the Archive counts, so this top-fandoms-by-works list is a little different from the plot above.
The total works/total hits lists are not that different, though there’s some obvious order reshuffling. The top fandoms by median hit count list is really different, though, with only Teen Wolf on there from among the top fandoms by hits or number of works. I can think of two explanations for why those fandoms in particular: either they’ve got massively better fic than other fandoms (hard to know why that would be), or there’s a big unmet desire for fic in those fandoms. Maybe a place to write, if you’re looking for lots of approbation. :)
Do fandoms produce works of the same length?
Kind of surprisingly: no. Those are big differences: the median BTS fic is 70% longer than the median Sherlock or Supernatural fic! Also note how very small these values are. 50% of all the works in Sherlock fandom are under 1705 words. You can also see that in the wordcount histograms in the last post, of course.
A couple of other questions: how many works are there in a typical fandom?
The most common number is 1! That’s very surprising to me.
I was also curious about how per-work hit counts relate to the number of works in a fandom. Naively, I would think that having more works in a fandom would increase hit counts: a person who reads a fic about fandom X is likely to want to read more fics about fandom X, so you build a self-sustaining readership if there are lots of fics to choose from. Also, since work creators are a subset of work readers, in general, what writers choose to write in is probably a good proxy for what readers are interested in reading; more fics means more people interested means more readers.
Here’s the actual relationship between number of works and median hit count:
It’s kind of noisy (meaning the points move around a lot), but for fandoms with more than ~5 works, we do see that more works means more hits. The increase actually stops around 1000 works, which I should have predicted above. (I’ve cut off the graph because it’s very noisy above 10,000 works, but the flattening continues.) Apparently, that’s about the point where you have more works in a fandom than even a devoted reader could read. If you have 10 works, or 20 works, then every possible reader can read everything, so more interest means more hits. But once you have more works than people can read, then, basically, adding readers and adding creators cancel each other out in the average hits per work.
Also kind of interesting is that things with <5 works seem to have more hits on average. I suspect this is because of Yuletide, which steers people to rare fandoms they might not read on their own.
Up next: tags.
I suspect that Yuletide, in addition to steering people to rare fandoms, is also responsible for a lot of the single-work fandoms. But I haven’t actually gone and checked.
Yeah, I was gonna say:
A couple of other questions: how many works are there in a typical fandom?
The most common number is 1! That’s very surprising to me.
Not if you know about Yuletide and other rare-fandom challenges.
It’s not Yuletide, interestingly enough. I thought that would be a big effect but it actually isn’t, at least with the way I’m counting fandoms.
Short version: I wanted to make sure I got all the stuff in the big fandoms like Marvel, so I put every fandom in the highest metafandom tag it was part of. So, for example, fic for the Justice League movie goes into the DCU bucket, but so does stuff for Batgirl, which was a Yuletide fandom. More importantly for Yuletide, I think, that means that, like, all the rare historical RPF gets dumped into the general RPF bucket, and fics for individual books may get dumped into an author’s works tag. This is a great way to understand big fandoms, but a terrible way to understand tiny fandoms.
Once I’ve done that bucketizing, only 20 of the 5000* single-work fandoms are due to Yuletide. I went spot-checking through those 5000 fandoms and I saw vids and giant multi-fandom crossovers in addition to regular fics in rare fandoms. I checked about 15 things and didn’t see any that were for specific challenges, so the rate of single-work top-level fandoms that are due to challenges is probably less than ~25%--not nearly enough to explain why the distribution looks like it does.
If you check out the Yuletide fandoms page, 2865 of the 7325 fandoms have only a single work in the Yuletide collection. But if I spot-check those fandoms, most of them have a number of non-Yuletide works as well.
I do think Yuletide is great at promoting rare fandoms, to be clear! It’s just that you can’t see it very well with the way this particular project handled fandom tags. (And as I say in a later section of the original post, I think it’s especially good at steering readers to those fics.)
*I messed up the vertical axis on the original plot. It’s right relatively speaking--something twice as big is still twice as big--but the absolute scale is wrong; there are about 5,000 fandoms with only 1 work, not 14,000. Working on a fix.
