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Toastystats: The sizes of fandoms on AO3

When I share data about fanworks on AO3, I often limit my analyses to the biggest fandoms. I generally do that because it's quicker to collect data about and analyze just the biggest fandoms -- not because those are the ones that matter most, and also not because most fanworks are in big fandoms. But I wanted to take a moment now to visualize the sizes of different fandoms on AO3 in a couple different ways -- and to highlight just how many of the fandoms on AO3 are smaller fandoms.

I love this way of looking at it! :)

AO3 Tag Wranglers recently began testing processes for updating canonical tags (tags that appear in the auto-complete and the filters) that don’t belong to any particular fandom (commonly known as No Fandom tags). We have already begun implementing some of the decisions made during the earliest discussions. By the time this post is published, you may have already noticed some changes we have made.  Several canonical tags are slated to be created or renamed, and we will also be adjusting the subtag and metatag relationships between some tags to better aid Archive users in filtering.  Please keep in mind that many of these changes are large and require a lot of work to identify and attach relevant tags, so it will likely take some time to complete. We ask that you please be patient with us while we work! While we will not be detailing every change we make under the new process, we will be making periodic posts with updates on those changes we believe are most likely to prove helpful for users looking to tag or filter works with the new or revised tags and to avoid confusion as to why changes are being made. 

Orgasm Control (including Orgasm Edging)

Edgeplay | High Risk BDSM Practices

Squirting and Vaginal Ejaculation

Created Using Generative AI

Calling Game of Thrones fans with knowledge of the fandom's history! [see also: Supernatural version]

I'm in the midst of putting together some fandom deep dives as part of my analysis of TV Fandom Fix-Its on AO3, including GoT. I'm trying to give context for how many fanworks the fandom was producing overall, and when overall spikes in fandom activity were happening, and I could use help.

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Supply (fanworks) vs Demand (kudos)

Details and full legend under the cut

(Images: Daily AO3 traffic, in millions of page views, grouped by month. The top graph contains the 2021 data, with a low of 31.3 million page views on January 13, and a high of 61.1 million on December 27. The bottom graph with the 2020 data has the lowest traffic (56.7 million page views) on January 4, and the highest (74.8 million) on December 27. The y-axis starts at 30 for easier comparison.)

2021 was another busy year for the Archive!

While a few months stood out in 2020 for well-known reasons (you can read more in our look back at 2020), 2021 was marked by a more uniform traffic pattern throughout the year. The mountain of holiday traffic with new record highs between December 26 and 30 remains a reassuring constant.

All traffic data can be found in this Google Spreadsheet:

(Image: Monthly AO3 traffic for 2020 and 2021, in billions of page views. 2020 shown in a light blue, 2021 in dark blue. Lowest number: 1.13 billion page views in February, 2020. Highest number: 2.04 billion page views in August and December, 2021.)

As discussed in our look back at 2020, AO3 traffic increased significantly in April of 2020, stabilized in the following months, and reached new record highs in November and December. 2021 continued in this vein, breaking all 2020 records and surpassing 2 billion page views in May, July, August, and December.

All traffic data can be found in this Google Spreadsheet:

What fanfic was the world writing in 2021? (AO3 Year In Review)

That sounds very cool! Looking forward to seeing it when you get to the point where you want to share. :)

(There is at least one pair of near-duplicate fandoms above that I just spotted; I'll try to remove those in the final version.)

A bunch of the other analyses are about which characters are tagged most as trans, nonbinary, genderfluid, and more; that's taking longer to analyze, but I think I finally have all the data gathered!

Keep reading for text versions of the above graphs (which includes extra data about number of fanworks), as well as for any corrections or clarifications.

In the coming days, we’ll be rolling out a code change that limits the total number of fandom, character, relationship, and additional tags that can be added to a work. This limit of 75 tags will apply to both new and existing works, but no tags will be automatically removed from existing works.

Well, let me introduce you to the amazing world of ✨ metatags ✨

One of the cool things about AO3′s tagging system is that tags are linked together in a way that if a general metatag is used to filter out works, all the tags housed under that metatag (called subtags) also get filtered out! 

For example, the tag “angst” is a metatag for “heavy angst”, “light angst”, “angst & fluff”, etc., so if someone excludes the “angst” tag from their search, any fics with those subtags will also be filtered out. So, if the author didn’t directly tag the fic with “angst”, but tagged it with “heavy angst”, excluding “angst” will hide the fic from you!

So if you are worried about not being able to tag every single variation of a trigger, check to see if the tags you’re adding are subtags of a tag you’ve already added to your fic. Click the search bar at the top > tags, then enter the tag, click canonical, and go to the page for that tag. Here’s a link to the page for the “fluff” tag as an example, it shows all the subtags that get filtered out if a user excludes “fluff” from their search! https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Fluff

Different sites handle their tags differently. The way you tag on twitter isn’t the same as the way you tag on tumblr isn’t the same as the way you tag on AO3. For example, both tumblr and AO3 allow spaces while twitter doesn’t.

Out of nearly 7.3 million works in that file, only 19,025 had more than 75 tags. That’s 0.26%. The smallest number of tags on a fic, after removing the above-mentioned tag categories, is one - some imported works have just the fandom tagged. The largest number of tags on a single fic is 671.

Longer fics = more tags. Of fics with a word count greater than 25k, the number with 75+ tags is 2.66% –still small, but an order of magnitude greater than the sitewide average. If you’re just looking at works with a wordcount above 500k – well, there are only a little over a thousand of those, but 12% have 75+ tags. On the other hand, some of the most egregiously over-tagged works (like Tags Georg with the 671 tags) are much shorter.

It also turns out that the number of tags per work has been growing over time. (You can also see this in Verity’s workbook.) Partly this is down to changing norms around tagging, but I can’t help but suspect it’s also party because, for the first couple years of the Archive, a lot of us were bulk-importing fics from LJ or DW and didn’t have the energy to back through and add tags to dozens of fics at a time.

And also, the number of tags overall increases as the number of fandoms tagged increases. This makes intuitive sense - crossovers have bigger casts, after all. (There’s also a tendency for multiple fandoms = longer work, which we’ve seen are linked to more tags in general). But there’s also the phenomenon I tend to call “multi-fandom pile-ups,” where a writer uses a single work to collect a bunch of unrelated ficlets under a single theme (like “Whumptober” or “Twitter prompts”). I suspect these are responsible for the works with 100+ fandom tags I found in the data. They’re also the ones that come to mind when I think of the “wall of tags” problem, even if it was a single-fandom fic that finally got AO3 to act on this issue.

So I binned the data from the dump, putting it into categories based on length and number of fandoms – and it turns out that multifandom works, while a tiny minority of fics in the Archive, make up a sizeable share of the fics affected by the new tag limits. You can see a pretty graph here, an OpenDocument spreadsheet here, or a summary table below:

For fics tagged with one fandom: they make up 78.45% of works on the Archive, and just 0.17% are over-tagged. This is 50.29% of the set of overtagged fics.

For fics tagged with two to five fandoms: they make up 21.00% of works on the Archive, and just 0.41% are over-tagged. This is 32.97% of the set of overtagged fics.

For fics tagged with six to ten fandoms: they make up just 0.47% of works on the Archive, and 5.08% are over-tagged. This is 9.17% of the set of overtagged fics.

For fics tagged with ten or more fandoms: they make up just 0.08% of works on the Archive, and 25.20% are over-tagged. This is 7.57% of the set of overtagged fics.

And this holds true across word count categories - with the added effect that multi-fandom fics are likely to be longer than mono-fandom ones.

Fanlore is now on Discord! After a period of closed beta, we’re opening up our official Discord server for everyone to join! 

Well folks I've been sitting on this little script for ages and finally decided to just go ahead and publish it. What does it do?

you can enter any ao3 link - for example, to your bookmarks or an author's works page - and automatically download all the works and series that are linked from that page in the format of your choice

if your format of choice is epub (sorry, this part doesn't work for other file formats), you can check your fanfic-savin' folder for unfinished fics and automatically update them if there are new chapters

if you're a dinosaur who uses Pinboard, you can back up all the Pinboard bookmarks you have that link to ao3

don't worry about crashing ao3 with this! this baby takes forever to run, guaranteed. anyway ao3 won't let me make more than one request per second even if I wanted to so it's quite safe

I've been working on this for about two years and it's finally in a state where it does everything I want and isn't breaking every two seconds, so I thought it was time to share! I hope y'all get some use out of it.

In the coming days, we’ll be rolling out a code change that limits the total number of fandom, character, relationship, and additional tags that can be added to a work. This limit of 75 tags will apply to both new and existing works, but no tags will be automatically removed from existing works.

The 2021 AO3 Ship Stats are now available on my AO3!

If you would be interested in helping out with:

Deciding what questions to include

Writing survey questions in the most inclusive way possible

Planning how best to distribute the survey

Planning how to analyse the survey data

Troubleshooting any other issues or potential issues that arise

Or if you otherwise want to contribute, you can join the project discord at: https://discord.gg/hrKDrDp3

Hello everyone! My name is Brianna Dym, and I’m a researcher with the Internet Rules Lab at CU Boulder. This summer, I want to talk to people about participating in activism as part of a fandom!

I would love to interview you if…

1. You are involved in fandom in some way, even if it’s just lurking. By fandom, we mean online communities where people are creating and sharing fanworks like fanart, fanfiction, cosplays, things like that.

2. You have participated in some kind of activism as part of your involvement in fandom! This might look like getting involved in a hashtag campaign, raising awareness for specific issues, getting involved with a non-profit that grew from fandom, giving to or organizing donation drives or charity campaigns. There’s a lot of examples, so if you’re not sure your experience qualifies please reach out through the google form linked below!

We can conduct the interview on any platform you want – either text-based chat or voice. Interviews typically last one hour. You will be compensated with a $20 gift card for your participation. Whether you participate or not, please consider sharing this call for participants with your social networks! And if you’d like to find out more about previous research I’ve conducted with fan communities, check out these published articles: https://briannadym.com/research-publications/

To volunteer to participate (or if you have any questions), please fill out this google form. I would absolutely love to speak with you.

Sincerely,