#fandom statistics

[centrumlumina]

I’m not sure whether you know the answer to this, or whether or not there’s a way to find out, but I’d like to ask:

In all of AO3’s history, how many instances has there been in which a fandom with over 100 or over 1000 fics has had a platonic relationship be the most written one, appearing at the top of the dropdown list?

Because I can only think of one (2 if you count both book and movie): Project Hail Mary.

And I’d really like to know whether there’s any others.

This isn't necessarily an exhaustive list (especially if the same pairing appears in multiple fandom tags, which many of these do), but I used my AO3 Ship Stats data to try to find a few of the largest fandoms where the largest relationship tag is a platonic one:

Batman - All Media Types - 194,603 works - top relationship Dick Grayson & Jason Todd

Minecraft (Video Game) - 115,828 works - top relationship Wilbur Soot & Technoblade & TommyInnit & Phil Watson | Philza

Dream SMP - 93,420 works - top relationship Wilbur Soot & TommyInnit

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - All Media Types - 39,556 works - top relationship Donatello & Leonardo & Michelangelo & Raphael (TMNT)

Danny Phantom - 28,996 works - top relationship Danny Fenton & Tucker Foley & Sam Manson

The Last of Us (Video Games) - 14,208 works - top relationship Ellie & Joel (The Last of Us)

White Collar (TV 2009) - 13,819 works - top relationship Peter Burke & Neal Caffrey

Star Wars: The Bad Batch (Cartoon) - 13,537 works - top relationship CT-9901 | Hunter & Omega (Star Wars: The Bad Batch)

The Outsiders - S. E. Hinton - 10,432 works - top relationship Darrel "Darry" Curtis Jr. & Ponyboy Curtis & Sodapop Curtis

Linked Universe - jojo56830 (Webcomic) - 10,327 works - top relationship Four & Hyrule & Legend & Sky & Time & Twilight & Warriors & Wild & Wind (Linked Universe)

[reclusiarch-orm]

FANDOM STATISTICS

(because i have autistics)

Short version: the fandom has literally doubled in size in the last 12 months. If you are an older fan feeling alienated, this is probably why. We're in a massive growth spurt!

When i joined this fandom about a year ago, i took down notes of the size of it. I wrote down the number of followers for the main tags, as well as some control tags. I also wrote down approximately how many notes fanart of varying characters and quality did over what time period, in order to estimate not just the size of the fandom itself, but also how much of it was "active" as opposed to an abandoned or casual interest. Here are my numbers, taken down on February 12th 2025.

#warhammer 40k - 14k followers #warhammer - 11k followers #WH40K - 3.8k followers #space marines - 2.8k followers

At the time i estimated the active fandom at about 2,000-3,000 people, based on the notes on the most well made fanart that had been circulated for 1-2 years.

These same tags as of today, February 16th 2026:

#warhammer 40k - 28k followers (literally doubled!!!) #warhammer - 15k followers #WH40K - 6.5k followers #space marines - 4.3k followers

Tags that have less than 1,000 people following them do not display a number. No primarch tag had a displayed number last year, and neither did #warhammer 30k. This year:

#warhammer 30k - 1.4k followers #magnus the red - 1.1k followers #roboute guilliman - 1.1k followers #konrad curze - 1.1k followers

#demetrian titus and #space marine 2 do not display follower counts. #emperor of mankind does not display. i did not take down #rogue trader last year, but it currently displays 2.8k.

I also compared numbers in the early summer of 2025, a few months in, and saw NO CHANGES. This growth started sometime AFTER midsummer 2025. It also seemingly did NOT go into the space marine 2 faction of the fandom, as it might be tempting to assume. #warhammer 40k DOUBLED, while #space marine 2 sits under 1,000 people following the tag (and not every fan even follows the tags! i don't!). These are not video game fans flooding in late.

my proposed conclusions is that the TUMBLR fandom:

-is experiencing huge growth, particularly going into the heresy era and 40k setting. NOT from the space marine games!

-has a much larger ACTIVE section that before. the note ceiling for wide-appeal fanart was about 2,000 ish notes, and now i have seen art reach that number in weeks. This activity is extremely recent.

We have more fans, and in my impression they are mostly still hanging around the entry level lore with characters like primarchs. Many more established fans have told me they feel alienated by the fandom lately, like things are different, and they can't express why. Well, I have über-autism, and felt compelled to track statistics the first thing i did when i got here. These are my findings. They may explain why the fandom feels weird right now: we are going through very explosive sudden growth in numbers, and the chafing that comes with that. Hold on, and hunker down.

And if you're new, well! (anglerfish voice) you should swim deeper in the lore. I say it's great down here. Also, please use general tags on xreader content ( like #x reader and #warhammer x reader) instead of just the character name. there are a gazillion characters.

[osterby]

Some quick numbers

I've been seeing an uptick in wank about AO3 stats, and as usual many of the people involved, on all sides, are just going off of vibes and hearsay and what they see in their own fandoms. So here are some actual numbers (gathered Jan 31st, 2026).

Total number of works on AO3

16,592,394

Total numbers of works for each Category

and the percentage of the archive that category comprises:

f/f: 1,580,118 - 9.52% f/m: 3,993,761 - 24.07% gen: 3,059,281 - 18.44% m/m: 7,961,378 - 47.98% multi: 879,715 - 5.30% other: 675,443 - 4.07%

The percentages add up to more than 100, because many works are tagged with multiple categories.

Total number of works for each category with the other categories filtered out

and the percentage of that tag they comprise:

f/f: 1,059,383 - 67.04% f/m: 2,855,641 - 71.50% gen: 2,305,949 - 75.38% m/m: 6,709,136 - 84.27% multi: 303,288 - 34.48% other: 345,323 - 51.13%

And because these conversations are being held in English by people who primarily interact with English language fics, while other languages on AO3 can have quite different ratios, here is the

Total number of English works on AO3

14,383,516 (or 86.69% of the archive)

and

Total numbers of works in English for each category

and the percentage of the English works each category comprises

f/f: 1,472,418 - 10.24% f/m: 3,650,686 - 25.38% gen: 2,844,103 - 19.77% m/m: 6,438,856 - 44.77% multi: 812,178 - 5.65% other: 615,009 - 4.28%

What do all these numbers mean? Probably just that AO3 was founded by slash fans, but whatever you think they mean, you are now slightly more informed, just like this snail.

[pygian-weapon]

I've seen some discourse regarding the methodology of the 2025 TOP AO3 SHIPS , especially regarding the lack of privated works or how the current analysis tends to punish older fandoms that might have authors deleting their past works. So I've decided to try my hand at manually computing the TOP 19 SHIPS ON AO3 for last year.

My method was to go through each Rating tag and select for works updated between Jan 1st, 2025 and Dec 31st, 2025. The decision to consider all works that updated in the year and not just those newly written like other Fanfiction Ship Ranking, comes from two reasons:

that's what the ao3 tag filter lets me do more easily and I made this table in less than an hour

I think works that keep updating for years also denote the interest and interaction of fans, so they should not be counted out

As a disclaimer, I did this through my personal ao3 account in order to view privated fics as well, but I have some authors muted so their works might have not appeared in my search.

For each Rating (Explicit, Not Rated, Teen and Up, Gen, Mature) I noted down the ships with the highest number of works in the Tag Filter. After doing that, I went back and checked the number of works for any ship that hadn't appeared before under a specific rating (for example, Han Jisung / Lee Minho which did not have many fics tagged as Gen).

Once I had the number of fics under every Rating for each ship, I simply summed the total and put them in descending order. I also highlighted in yellow the ship that had the highest number of works for each rating.

Among the issues that might affect this method, I have no way of knowing how many ships crossover with each other, especially when they're from the same media. Are Lily and James Potter actually that popular, or are they just in the background of all other Harry Potter ships ( I am trying to be objective but I am judging all of you)? Do Jayvik and Caitvi feature in many works together? And most importantly, are author tagging appropiately, or are they tagging as main also couples that barely feature in a scene?

I will be very happy to receive suggestions on how to get more accurate results. I also think this method would be very difficult to expand to incorporate more than a few dozens of ships.

[sprinklecipher]

Death Cab for Cutie Songs & Ao3 Fic Titles

When I made some graphs about the number of Ao3 fics with Postal Service song names in their titles, I was also curious about what that would look like for Death Cab for Cutie, so I ran the numbers for DCfC songs as well. Here's the 10 DCFC songs that have the most Ao3 fics that include the song name in their title:

And here's graphs for Transatlanticism, Plans, and Narrow Stairs:

The remaining album-specific graphs, method details, and data link below the cut

Data notes

The counts are the number of fics on Ao3 that contain the song name somewhere in the title (i.e., the full fic title could include other words in addition to the song name), as of 9/8/2025. I used the Ao3 “Any field” search with the modifier “title:” added, since the “title” field search didn't seem to support exact phrase filtering, for some reason. The counts don't include restricted fics

To be clear, I’m not claiming the counts equal the number of fics named after the songs (especially for the songs with shorter, more generic names) :)

Every song on Plans has at least 1 fic on Ao3 with the exact same name as it.* Transatlanticism and Narrow Stairs do also if you aren’t strict about punctuation (for "Expo '86" and “Cath…”), and Kintsugi does too if you count a fic named with the title-dropping lyrics from “Everything’s a Ceiling”

Data is available here, with a bunch of extra columns related to number of Google search results for each exact title, with or without “Death Cab for Cutie” included (I was trying to come up with a way to adjust for the distinctiveness of the song names/how much the song names were specific to the songs vs being common phrases in their own right, but the result was a total mess, so not posting that here lol)

*call that “The Same Name for Different Things”. or something idk but I feel like there’s a joke in there somewhere

Album Graphs

[sprinklecipher]

The Postal Service Songs & Fic Titles

inspired by this post, I made a graph about how many fics on Ao3 have Postal Service song names in their titles:

Method info/additional details below the cut

Data notes:

The counts are the number of fics on Ao3 that contain the song name somewhere in the title (i.e., the full fic title could include other words in addition to the song name), as of 9/8/2025. I used the Ao3 “Any field” search with the modifier “title:” added, since the “title” field search didn't seem to support exact phrase filtering, for some reason. The counts don't include restricted fics

To be clear, I'm not claiming the counts equal the number of fics named after the songs (especially for the songs with shorter, more generic names) :)

Notably, there’s at least 1 fic on Ao3 with an exact title match for every single song on Give Up except for “Clark Gable”, although there is a single fic that mentions Clark Gable in its title

Also, here's the graph again but sorted by album order, because why not:

[svperluminous]

Results for the Ezran ship poll

Total number of votes excluding "show results" - 21.

The number of votes is too small for this to be even remotely representative but it's still interesting to see what the people who regularly check the tag prefer!

Some more graphs:

[supernatural-word-search]

happy pride :-) Dean is the only character who uses the word ‘gay’ more than once in 15 seasons of supernatural