Dear Toast, I was doing a google search for a particular AO3 stat, and although I didn’t find the stat, I did find your wonderful blog. Is there a way to see how many AO3 fandoms have less than X number of works? I was scrolling through the alphabetical list of movie fandoms and couldn’t believe how many fandoms have only 1-5 works. I’d love to see a stat like “87% of AO3 fandoms have less than 5 works,” or something like that. Is that possible? Also, your cats are adorable! Happy new year!
Hey – thanks for your lovely note! And belated happy new year to you as well. :D
Good question! As with so many things, fandom size follows a power law – most fandoms have few fanworks, while relatively few are large. But I didn’t have exact numbers, until I ran an analysis just now:
The fandom size is on the x-axis (log scale to make it easier to see the line). This graph says that 35% of the fandoms on AO3 have only 1 fanwork. 62% of fandoms have 5 or fewer fanworks, and so on. While there are a few fandoms with over 100K fanworks, I stopped the graph there, because almost all fandoms have fewer than that – in fact, less than 1% of fandoms have 10K or more fanworks!
While one could feel sad for all the fandoms with only 1 fanwork, here are a few things to remember that cheer me up:
Sometimes people misunderstand fandom tags and stick other things in there instead. E.g., “(prolly the film but shoot ur fuckin shot my dude!)“ and other quirky items which can be found in Uncategorized Fandoms. (Although I actually did exclude “Uncategorized Fandoms” from this particular analysis, so I guess that’s not adding to the above stats.)
Sometimes people use different names for the same fandom, and the AO3 tag wranglers haven’t gotten around to uniting them all yet. E.g., I wrote a fic with the fandom tag “Ana Ng - They Might Be Giants (Song)” which was initially just in its own little fandom, but eventually got wrangled under They Might Be Giants, which is itself within Bandom (so now it’s in those larger fandoms, too).
Which brings me to another point: for some of the fandoms that have only one work in them, that fanwork also belongs to bigger fandoms.
And anyway, it’s pretty awesome how many diverse sources fans have drawn inspiration from when creating fanworks! :D
