Idea for more fandom analysis: which (large) fandoms have the highest interaction rates with fics ie the highest hits to kudos/comment ratios. I've seen talk about the decline of interactions between authors and readers lately and I'm curious if the data backs this up. (Obviously the over time part is hard to do now, but a snapshot in time would still be interesting! )
(Part 2) I just find it interesting that the supernatural fandom has some of the highest numbers of fics, but then when you look at high kudos counts they dont even make the list.
Hey! Sorry I missed this before.
It's an interesting question, and one I've only looked at slightly before. IIRC, for instance, Teen Wolf has a lot more works that get very high numbers of comments and kudos than a lot of large fandoms. But I don't know if TW is also higher than other big fandoms on average, or just overrepresented at the very top of the distribution (and similarly, I don't know if SPN has lower feedback rates on average than other large fandoms, or is just underrepresented in the most-kudosed list). And I also don't know if feedback rates vary more by ship/trope than by fandom, or how the feedback rates in a given fandom vary over time (a particularly tough question, as you note).
I don't have time to look into this in detail now, but will keep it in mind for the future. If others have studied this, please chip in!
Edit: Found it! I did look at average feedback rates (as well as maximum) for 10 large fandoms on AO3, and compared also to FFN. This was back in 2015. But SPN is there! :) This doesn't fully address the questions, and doesn't look at ratios of metrics -- just numbers of kudos, numbers of comments, etc. But it's relevant. I also looked at variation in the rate of kudos/hits across a different set of fandoms, but my methods there were dubious... My data scraping scripts are not well set up to gather averages for ratios (like kudos/hits or comments/hits).