#1d statistics

[aethel]

I recently noticed that Niall now has more twitter followers than Harry, so I wanted to see if this was reflected in their popularity as characters in fanworks, so I looked at their AO3 character tags. Nope. Top graph shows raw numbers per year for each character tag (I used the advance Work Search while logged in). Bottom graph shows the same as a percent of all AO3 fanworks updated that year.

AO3′s overall popularity has changed dramatically, so the normalized version may be less useful.

A limitation on using character tags is that I think a lot of people just tag for everyone who appears, not just the main character(s). Plus Louis being the second most popular probably is due to the prevalence of Harry/Louis.

[aethel]

I tried another way to track the growth of 1D fandom, but the wayback machine didn’t capture Harry Styles’s twitter account consistently. Surely someone has graphed this with better software than Google Charts? (Google image search is giving me nothing.)

[aethel]

I last checked in 2015, so I thought I’d do an update. Data collected from AO3 works search using the AO3 pairing tags, while logged in. I did not include 2011 data because there were only 57 works.

I also noticed a lot of 1D fanworks from the early years have been deleted, based on the raw counts I had as of early 2015:

2011: 18.57% deleted 2012: 14.75% deleted 2013: 26.99% deleted 2014: 29.35% deleted

ETA: Just realized that because I was using date updated and not date posted, the count change may not have been due entirely to deletions--they could have been updated over multiple years.