Early FanFiction.net Age Demographics
While gathering data on the LotR fandom on FanFiction.net in the early 2000s, I stumbled across an October 2000 Wayback capture of their homepage, which included a poll, asking users' ages. The results are here.
69% of the more than 28,000 respondents were teens.
To offer some points of comparison:
The 2003 study reported in the Journal of Slash Research found 62% of participants were 20 or under.
@centrumlumina's 2013 AO3 Census' age data found 43% of participants were 21 or younger.
On the 2015 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey, 37% of participants were age 21 or under. The median age was 24.
On the 2020 Tolkien Fanfiction Survey, 14% of participants were 18 or 19, and the median age was 27. Important note: The Institutional Review Board for this iteration of the survey did not allow us to collect data for anyone under the age of 18. (In 2015, the IRB allowed this, which may well have been an oversight!) Therefore, we had to throw out all data for under-18s, so the younger demographic will necessarily be underrepresented.
In short, Fanfiction Fandom (both the wider fandom and Tolkien-specific communities) seem to be much younger in the early 2000s than they were even ten years later.
Does this mean fewer teens are writing fanfiction? Are they mostly using sites like Wattpad and less AO3 and fandom-specific sites/archives? Or are we seeing the effects of a demographic that came of age with the internet, began writing fanfiction in their teens in the early 2000s, and is still writing fanfiction over a decade later? Or something else?
(Posted by @dawnfelagund)
