#fandom stats

[destinationtoast]

Toastystats: Happy anniversary, Goncharov fandom!

In honor of two years since Tumblr went nuts over Goncharov, I've archived my original stats and analyses (including discussion/stats about the prevalence of femslash in the fandom), and I've done some follow up analyses.

Click through to AO3 for more data and discussion, and for any clarifications/corrections.

[ao3demographicssurvey2024]

The AO3 Demographics Survey 2024 was an unofficial demographics survey of 16,131 AO3 users conducted in January 2024. We have just finished posting our initial results, so here is just a taste of the graphs and data you can check out now over on AO3!

The anonymised dataset from this survey is now available for researchers.

A full list of the survey questions with links to the relevant data is below the cut!

Demographics

How old are you?

Do you identify as LGBTQ+ in any form?

What is your gender identity?

Do you identify as any of the following? (LGBTQ+ related identities)

What is your sexual orientation?

What is your romantic orientation?

What is your race?

Is English your native language?

Which geographic region best describes your current place of residence?

Which religious or spiritual tradition(s) do you believe?

Do you experience the following? (Disability, Neurodivergence, and Health Conditions)

Usage of AO3

Which of the following AO3 activities have you done in the last twelve months?

How frequently do you use the following methods to find works on AO3?

In a typical week, how long do you spend on AO3 or reading downloaded AO3 works?

When did you begin using AO3, with or without an account?

When did you create your first AO3 account?

What languages do you use for reading and posting on AO3?

Works You Post On AO3

Which of the following types of works do you post on AO3? (Media)

Of the works you post on AO3, how often do you post works with the following ratings?

Of the works you post on AO3, how often do you post works focused on the following types of relationships?

Of the works you post on AO3, how often do you post works in the following genres/tags?

Of the works you post on AO3, how often do you post the following types of works? (Format & Miscellaneous)

Works You Consume On AO3

Which of the following types of works do you consume on AO3? (Media)

How much do you enjoy works with the following ratings on AO3?

How much do you enjoy works focused on the following types of relationships on AO3?

How much do you enjoy works in the following genres/tags on AO3?

How much do you enjoy the following types of works on AO3? (Format & Miscellaneous)

Fandom Beyond AO3

Which of the following types of fanworks have you consumed in the last year?

Which of the following types of fandom activity have you done in the last year?

Which of the following websites or apps do you currently use for fandom activities at least once a month?

Which of the following websites or apps have you previously used for fandom activities, but no longer regularly use?

When did you first begin participating in fandom?

How many fandoms have you considered yourself a part of in the last five years?

Which of the following types of media do you participate in fandoms for?

[naryrising]

A claim I often see sensible people make is that AO3 is not representative of fandom as a whole. And I agree with this! I think that fandom encompasses a lot of different groups and AO3 is merely one segment of a much broader spectrum of fannish activity. Lots of fandom activity doesn't revolve around fanfiction at all, and even in the segments of fandom where it does, not all fanfiction is on AO3. People like to generalize about fandom based on AO3, partly because it's what they are personally most familiar with, and partly because AO3 makes it very easy to see stats, while other sites often obscure that information or don't make it available at all. If you see a claim that "fandom always prefers M/M ships" for instance, that's a claim based on someone looking at AO3 and no further, and it's therefore an inaccurate (or at the very least, unproven) claim.

So, I have no desire to push back against the notion that AO3 isn't representative of all of fandom. I think that it's correct! But it often goes hand-in-hand with another claim that I do want to question. That is the claim that not only is AO3 not representative of fandom more broadly, but that it is in fact the smallest of the 'big 3' fanfic sites (the other two being fanfiction.net and wattpad).

This used to be true! But I don't think it's true anymore. I think in terms of number of posted works, it probably falls in between the two, and in terms of traffic, it's probably the biggest.

Now, I will say up front that I have absolutely no way to determine how many of wattpad's works are fanfiction. I have no REAL way to determine how many works there are on wattpad at all, because they don't make this information available anywhere that I can find. Googling for 'how many stories are there on wattpad' gets claims of 665 million works. It might be true, I have no way to prove or disprove it. It sounds like a lot to me, but who knows. (For instance, it actually says '665 million uploads' but how many of those are later deleted?) But even if that number is accurate for the site, a lot of what is on wattpad is original fiction. So trying to guess how much of that alleged total is fanfic is pretty impossible. If someone has an idea, feel free to try it and see how that goes, and let me know!

But fanfiction.net, while it doesn't make it easy to get overall numbers for the entire site, does at least provide numbers for works per category, like this:

These numbers are, to be clear, inaccurate. If you click through to the fandom, you will see a much lower number - sometimes as low as half the displayed number on the category page. For instance, if you open the Supernatural page, there are 96.2K stories listed, not 127K. You might say, ah, but Nary, fanfic.net also includes crossovers separately from the other fics in a fandom, and maybe those totals include the crossovers! They might, but the numbers still don't add up even when crossovers are included (I spot checked this across several fandoms to be sure). I can only assume that the 127K number is something like 'all Supernatural works ever posted, including ones that later got deleted'. It certainly doesn't represent the current actual total of works available in that fandom.

So to get somewhat more accurate numbers, you have to look at each fandom's individual page. Today (November 16, 2025) I did this for the top 100 fandoms in each category (Anime/Manga, Books, Cartoons, Comics, Games, Misc, Movies, Plays, TV) with the following exceptions: in Comics, Plays, and Misc there weren't 100 fandoms to go through, or before I got to 100 I was down into very small numbers of works, like double digits. In those cases, I stopped before reaching 100 fandoms because I didn't feel like counting up a lot of fandoms with ~50 works. In TV, conversely, there was a longer tail of fandoms with ~2000 or so works, so I kept going up to 150 fandoms to capture most of those.

I added up the totals for each set of top fandoms, and then the totals across the board. I got 5,553,596 works.

This is certainly leaving out a lot of works - a ton of fandoms that have triple digit or lower counts of works wouldn't have been counted by this method. I'm not claiming this is the accurate total of works on ff.net - just that this method covers the big fandoms there.

AO3, as of today (November 16, 2025), has 16,260,000 works. I do believe this is a relatively accurate number reflecting works currently actually available on the site (obviously it's rounded but other than that).

I think there's no way that fanfiction.net has 10 million more works that I didn't count using my quick and dirty method. I think that sometime in the last several years, AO3 passed it in terms of number of works on the site. Again, I can't compare it to wattpad, but that would put AO3 at least in the middle of the three sites, not at the bottom.

And then there's traffic, which is another measure of what people can mean when they talk about 'how big' a site is. And here, I think it can be shown that AO3 is far in the lead of the other two. This data was taken from similarweb, a service that compares website traffic (and other things, but traffic is what I'm interested in here).

This is a comparison with what similarweb thinks are the websites most like AO3 - it correctly figures it's closest to fanfiction.net and wattpad.com (and tvtropes which is interesting, if not really relevant here). The traffic to each site over the last 3 months (August 2025-October 2025) shows AO3 with over 2x the traffic of wattpad, and 7x the traffic of fanfiction.net.

Wattpad still has more unique visitors, according to the further breakdown of info similarweb provides on engagement.

AO3 has nearly double Wattpad's page views, however, and nearly 10x as many page views as fanfiction.net.

I don't know how really useful this is, but I wanted to share it so that people who like to think about fandom stats can take it under consideration (or tell me I'm wrong if they see a mistake I made!) and so that more generally, we can consider reframing our view of AO3's relative size and popularity compared to other big fanfic sites, so (especially those of us who have been around AO3 for a comparatively long time) aren't still operating under our impressions of what things were like 5-10 years ago.

Hope you enjoyed, let me know if this is helpful at all, or if you can think of things I overlooked!

[the-ao3-stats]

Average total AO3 stats

Inspired by various posts showcasing people's stats, I wanted to get a base average for user stats. If you wish to contribute, please fill in the following form!

Average total AO3 stats

This form intends to gather data in order to establish the baseline of what are the overall stats for the average AO3 writer. If you wish to

The data obtained will be fully anonymous and only used as a part of a whole dataset. If you know someone who would be interested in filling it in, feel free to share it around! Thank you <3

[jackwhiteprophetic]

graph (tracking how often Buck and Eddie say each others' names) is NOW UPDATED TO INCLUDE 8a!!!!

(CLICK FOR QUALITY)

[fanonplussed]

Comments in fandom!

Results from this survey may be used for an informal fannish presentation at Citrus Con 2026. If you want to talk more about this topic or

✨FANDOM SCIENCE✨

I'll be giving a chill presentation for the upcoming @citruscon about commenting, so please help out with a short, anonymous survey about commenting on fanworks!

[osterby]

So the flavour of the day is Bad Fandom Stats, and it turns out that not only is centreoftheselights using a wildly inaccurate method of counting ship popularity during a given year for the Year In Review fandom stats, but also that nearly every column on the chart is a lie. @5ummit exploded the whole methodology issue last year, so I'll just link their post and dive into other stuff.

One would think, looking at a list of popular ships with their fandoms listed next to them, that the named fandom is simply the one within which the ship exists.

The ship at the top of that list is "Evan "Buck" Buckley/Eddie Diaz (9-1-1 TV)" and the fandom is listed as "9-1-1 (TV)"; that's pretty straightforward, there's only the one TV show and those characters are from that show.

But then we get down to ships with characters that exist in multiple versions or subsections of a canon which have their own fandom tags on AO3, and things start getting janky

One of the first things I noticed was weird about this year's chart (aside from the numbers themselves being just straight up wrong) was that the fandom for Kirk/Spock was listed as "Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)", the AO3 tag for the reboot movies. That felt wrong, because while I know the reboot movies are big on AO3, most of the K/S stuff I've seen recently has either been expressly original cast or not specific to any one cast or iteration of canon.

I thought that the list might have been saying that Reboot Kirk/Spock alone was big enough to make the list while Generic and Original Kirk/Spock were separate fandoms that hadn't gotten onto the list. That would be absurd for new fic count, but there are stranger things on this list and the methodology favours newer ships, so I went digging.

A search for Kirk/Spock fic posted in 2024 and a glance at the sidebar gives us this, out of 2,255 total fics

Searching for Kirk/Spock fics updated, rather than newly posted, in 2024 also puts the All Media Types and Original Series tags above the Reboot Movies.

But searching the entire unfiltered ship tag gets us this, out of 22,426 fics

This means two things.

1.) Despite the listed fandom on the year end chart, Kirk/Spock (and by extension, all the other ships from fandoms with more than one iteration of canon [and some Batman ships are on there, so we've got far more complex things than simply reboot movies and TV/anime adaptions of novels/manga]) is a generic ship tag.

2.) the fandom listed was taken from the unfiltered tag, not from this year's data.

And centreoftheselights confirms that this is indeed her methodology.

The fandoms are, quite simply, wrong.

--

Since we do not have access to her data and her methods are not replicable, we can't check how many of the ships might have been struck with a mismatch between which version of their canon is most popular overall vs this year.

I can't even be certain that there is a mismatch for Kirk/Spock. It's possible that the fics that actually make up her numbers have more reboot movie fic than otherwise. No one will ever know.

--

It is interesting to dig into the differences. I find it utterly fascinating that Kirk/Spock had a period that pushed the reboot movies to the top of the list overall and has since settled into Original Cast being more popular, all while the ships remained consistently popular enough to regularily end up on Top Ship Lists.

Centreoftheselights' data does not allow us to dig into those differences, or even to meaningfully speculate about them.

--

And yet more! As I explained in this reblog, the "type" column is not harvested from the data itself, but is a subjective interpretation of what centreoftheselights believes the characters' genders is or could or might be. So not only are all the columns wrong, they aren't even wrong in the same ways.

Over the whole sheet, the columns are: ⚠️Rank: Well, it accurately lists the order of the inaccurate counts, so I guess the column technically isn't inaccurate ⚠️Change: This is indeed the change in rank from last year's chart. It accurately lists the difference between two different inaccurate ranks ✔️ Relationship: accurate! This is the ship tag on AO3 ❌ Fandom: Inaccurate. Actually a top tag within the ship tag, not the fandom the ship is from ❌Works Gained: Inaccurate. see @5ummit's debunk ✔️Total Works: accurate! this is indeed the size of the tag on AO3 ❌Type: Inaccurate. OP's best guess, subjective interpretation, or headcanon ❌Race: Inaccurate. Same as above.

--

Tagging @olderthannetfic and @5ummit since you two have kind of been doing the heavy lifting on this one :)

Also plugging the more accurate chart by Randomist1031, which, in addition to having accurate fic counts, also lists fandoms by generic names rather than top tag, which increaes both accuracy and readability. https://archiveofourown.org/chapters/158271001

[inquisitor-gayfax]

The State of 40K Femslash on AO3 (8/25)

Inspired by @fandomyuriindex's recent 40K Yuri Index, I did a deep dive into the makeup of F/F works on Archive of Our Own for the Warhammer 40.000 Fandom using data collected on 8/12/25.

My findings, as well as discussion of the results, are beneath the cut.

Feel free to discuss in reblogs, comments, or tags!

40K Fanworks on AO3 by the Numbers: An Overview

Total works in Warhammer 40.000 (40K): 11,420

Total 40K Works excluding crossovers: 9,724

Earliest F/F 40K work: February 17, 2016

40K F/F at Large: Numbers and Top Ten

Total F/F works (excluding crossovers, F/M, M/M, Other, and Fanart): 318

Top Ten:

Original Female Character(s)/Original Female Character(s): 30

Celestine/Katarinya Greyfax: 24

Yrliet Lanaevyss/The Rogue Trader | Lord Captain: 24

Original Adepta Sororitas Character(s)/Original Adepta Sororitas Character(s): 12

Original Character(s)/Original Character(s): 11

Jae Heydari/The Rogue Trader | Lord Captain: 10

Kibellah/The Rogue Trader | Lord Captain: 9

Cassia Orsellio/The Rogue Trader | Lord Captain: 9

Necron Character(s)/Necron Character(s): 5

Rogal Dorn/Perturabo: 4

Comments:

Relationships featuring at least one original character (OC), including those related to the 2023 Rogue Trader CRPG (RT), dominate with 8 out of 10 spots. Note that if OC / OC ships were consistently tagged in the same manner, they would hold the No. 1 spot by an even greater margin. More on that to follow.

Of the two remaining ships in the top ten, one (Rogal Dorn/Perturabo) is a dual genderbend ship, leaving us with Celestine/Greyfax (Celefax) as the sole F/F ship in the top ten featuring two canonical women characters.

40K F/F without RT: Numbers and Top Ten

Total F/F works (excluding RT sub-fandom): 245

Top Ten:

Original Female Character(s)/Original Female Character(s): 30

Celestine/Katarinya Greyfax: 24

Original Adepta Sororitas Character(s)/Original Adepta Sororitas Character(s): 12

Original Character(s)/Original Character(s): 10

Necron Character(s)/Necron Character(s): 5

Rogal Dorn/Perturabo: 4

Original Astra Militarum Character(s)/Original Astra Militarum Character(s): 4

Fulgrim/Sanguinius: 3

Original Adepta Sororitas Character(s)/Original Female Character(s): 3

Aphone Ire/Jenetia Krole: 3

Comments:

OC ships continue to dominate, holding 6 out of 10 spots, with the remainder of the top ten an even two-two split between dual genderbend ships and ships featuring two canonical women characters (hereafter referred to as ‟canon F/F ships”).

Due to the wide variation in OC ship tagging practices (sometimes including designations like faction, gender, etc.), a hand count is required to determine the total numbers and percentages of F/F works attributable to OC ships, genderbent ships, and canon F/F ships.

A review of 13 pages of AO3 search results gives us the following data:

40K F/F Works (excluding RT) Hand Count Results:

OC Ships: 171 (69.8%)

Canon F/F Ships: 47 (19.2%)

Genderbent Ships: 27 (11%)

40K Canon/Canon F/F Works: Numbers and Top Seven*

*8th place and below have only one work

Total Canon/Canon F/F works: 74

Top Seven:

Celestine/Katarinya Greyfax: 24

Rogal Dorn/Perturabo: 4

Fulgrim/Sanguinius: 3

Aphone Ire/Jenetia Krole: 3

Esha Ani Mohana/Vethorel: 2

Amar Astarte/Erda: 2

Ursula Creed/Morvenn Vahl: 2

Comments:

Celefax has a runaway lead at No. 1 (~32.4% of canon/canon F/F fics), despite a relatively small number of 24 works (26 with crossovers). Dual genderbend ships account for two of the top seven, and canon F/F ships round out the remaining four spots.

Zooming out, ships with at least one genderbent character represent 36.5% of canon/canon F/F works (27), with the remaining ~63.5% of canon/canon F/F works (47) being canon F/F ships.

Discussion

Let's start by acknowledging we are talking about a tiny iteration of a matryoshka of niche subfandoms, in a wider fandom which has been referred to as ten different fandoms wearing a trenchcoat. Fanfiction (shipfic in particular) is a small portion of the fandom ecosystem at large, and AO3 is by no means the only online space for people interested in transformative 40K fanworks.

That being said, as overall trends related to F/F shipping have been discussed elsewhere many times, I will be focusing on the following two specific trends we see in 40K F/F fanfiction posted to AO3: (1) predominance of OC ships; and (2) lack of critical mass for canon F/F ships other than Celefax.

OCs as Tradition and Necessity

40K has a long tradition of encouraging and supporting fans in creating original concepts, characters, and accompanying lore. Building and painting your own special little guys and writing their story with dice rolls is a hugely enjoyable part of the tabletop game, so it makes perfect sense that some fans would also choose to immortalize their OCs (and perhaps make them kiss) in fanfiction, or vice versa.

Notwithstanding that tradition, 40K also has an enormous cast of canon characters, and this is where the most obvious and oft-cited rationale for the comparative lack of F/F content comes in: canon characters are predominantly men.

While this is undoubtedly true, I don't think it's the whole story. Black Library has been making concerted efforts in recent years to include more women protagonists and POV characters in published content, and as someone who started with more recent novels and worked my way backwards, it's noticeable.

I personally suspect the structure and nature of 40K lore is a huge contributing factor. The canon is enormous, spread out, and often contradictory. Resources can be difficult or impossible to access (e.g. hard copies only available for exorbitant prices secondhand). It's overwhelming and difficult to know where to start.

Moreover, everybody likes different things, and even a dedicated F/F fan might have to search far and wide before finding something that speaks to them, or there might simply not be any canon characters that fit exactly what they're looking for. Others might simply be uninterested in the Black Library novels, and prefer to work from scratch using the codex for their favorite faction.

Under these circumstances, and given 40K's OC-friendliness in general, it's no wonder many people choose to create characters perfectly suited to the story they want to tell.

Beyond Celefax: Lack of Critical Mass for Canon F/F Ships

Let's begin with the obvious: other than Celefax, there is not a single canon F/F ship on AO3 that comes close to breaking double digits. The good news is that the bar is low if you want to get your favorite canon F/F ship into the top ten. Pen a few drabbles and your ship has a spot! The bad news is that fans of any particular canon F/F ship rarely have more than one work to enjoy, if at all.

The reality is that we have very few F/F relationships that are truly canon. As relatively popular as Celefax is, it's a nod-and-a-wink dynamic; Lelith Hesperax and Morghana Nathrax are the only canon relationship with a meaningful amount of content (with the caveat that I haven't read everything, including Mark of Faith, which I've heard is hella gay).

Other than that, canon relationships are often relegated to minor or background characters, like Corporal Mari Magot and Sergeant Grifen in the Ciaphas Cain novels, Ani and Sev in the Alpharius primarch novella, and Inquisitor Marguerethe Wienand and her bodyguard Rendenstein in the Beast Arises series, to name three.

While there are other women characters who have (or have the potential for) chemistry, it's only natural that fans would be primarily drawn to canon or heavily implied relationships like Celefax, both of which are in unfortunately short supply.

Suggestions & Closing Thoughts

What follows are a few humble recommendations for how we can encourage the creation of more F/F works in the 40K fandom. Even if you don't plan on creating fanworks yourself, you can still make a difference by inspiring and encouraging others!

Sharing is Caring: This applies to so many things! Book excerpts, lore snippets, headcanons, memes, fanart & fanfiction (your own and others'), factional or character expertise, enthusiastic screeching, etc.! If you love it, chances are there are others out there who will too.

Let Creativity and Passion Guide You: There are so many ways to make good use of the incredible lore and characters we do have! Create an OC, pair up characters from different factions/timelines, or get creative with AUs (30K/40K, time travel, historical, warhammer fantasy/AoS, noir, etc.)!

Support Your Peers: This one is huge! It's hard to keep up creative motivation when we feel like we're screaming into the void, especially when people are vocal about wanting more F/F content. Leave kudos and comments on fics, encourage others, offer to beta read or play sounding board, get unhinged in the tags! We are a community first and foremost, and there are a lot more of us than you might think. So even if it feels daunting at first, I encourage you to get out there and engage!

Finally, I would be remiss not to state that quantity, by itself, is not a perfect metric for the enthusiasm of a fanbase. Despite the relatively small number of F/F 40K fanfiction works on AO3, in my experience, the authors and readers are some of the most dedicated and enthusiastic (not to mention supportive and kind) human beings out there! One fanfic might seem like a drop in the bucket, but I and many authors I know often spend months and even years working on a single project.

The numbers simply do not reflect the amount of time and effort F/F authors spend researching, daydreaming, plotting, writing, and editing, nor do they reflect the incredible love and support we receive when we post something new for our extremely appreciative audience. We may be snacking on crumbs in our little niche, but it is warm and cozy, the company can't be beat, and there's always room for more <3