#fanwork statistics

[ao3demographicssurvey2024]

In the AO3 Demographics Survey 2024 - an unofficial demographics survey of 16,131 AO3 users - 44% of respondents used AO3 to consume art or comics, and 17% used the site to read essays or meta.

To see more analysis, including transcripts of all the data shown on the graphs, please view the full results on AO3.

[aethel]

I wanted to see how Chinese and Russian fans were doing post-AO3 bans, so I whipped up some Google charts.

data collected manually while logged in, using the work search and language tags

中文-普通话 國語 Русский Español Українська

[aethel]

Graph showing Russian-language fanworks posted per month on the AO3, as a percentage of all fanworks posted that month. I collected data from AO3′s works search, while logged in, on April 21, 2023.

I believe the spike in December 2022 was caused by the passage of a Russian law expanding the prohibition on sharing positive information or publishing media about LGBT people from just children to everyone.

[aethel]

I looked at the Podfic tag on AO3 and filtered by data updated and various fandom tags, while logged in.

[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]

Top graph shows the number of English language fanworks posted per month in the Faraway Wanderers (novel) and Word of Honor (tv show) fandom tags on AO3 as a percentage of all AO3 works posted in the same period. Bottom graph shows the raw numbers. I used AO3′s work search to grab counts while logged in.

I wanted to check when the English-language fandom for the novel vs. the show took off, fanfic-wise, but it looks like they took off at the same time, March 2021. The tv show started airing February 22, 2021. As it happens, the fan translation of the novel wasn’t completed until a few weeks later, March 14, 2021. So, this is speculation on my part, but I’m guessing most people found the novel because of the show, and the few English speakers who read the novel before the show started didn’t want to write fanfic until the translation was complete(?). The novel is by Priest, so Guardian fans and other cnovel fans would theoretically be interested in reading it, but apparently not to the extent of writing fanfic. (??)

The AO3 tag situation is quite different from the MDZS/Untamed fandom, where the start of English fanwork posting makes it look like the English speaking fandom got into the novel because of the cartoon, and the fan translation was completed before the live-action show aired. On AO3 it looks like a lot of show fans decided to use the book fandom tag (because everyone else was using it? as a substitute for a meta tag that the wranglers refused to create?), so now the MDZS tag has more fanworks than the Untamed tag. I’ve seen a lot of complaints that most of them are show-canon fics. Out of 41K MDZS fics in English, 25K are also tagged with The Untamed.

Whereas the Word of Honor tag is more than 4x larger than the Faraway Wanderers tag. Although the Faraway Wanderers tag may suffer from the same problem as the MDZS book tag: 849 out of 1050 are also tagged with Word of Honor. Unless these are really book fics that want to be seen by the show audience?

[aethel]

Another discord discussion on the rise and fall of certain RPF fandoms and podfic popularity vs. overall popularity of a fandom prompted me to make another comparison graph on AO3 fanworks for these fandoms. Check it out; the prevalence of podfic for a fandom isn’t closely correlated with the overall size of the fandom.

I got these numbers using the work search function while logged in. For the podfic numbers, I relied on the “Podfic” tag, which not all podfics on the archive use....

[aethel]

Google charts of Word of Honor and Word of Honor RPF fanworks posted per month on Archive of Our Own. Data collected January 2, 2022, while logged in (so the counts include archive-locked works).