Just a fan slinging data. Fan analytics, statistics, and data science as a fanwork. Data engineer by day. Fandom stats reblogs and personal project updates. My work tends towards pan-fandom analysis.
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.
Read more on AO3 (and get further explanations, clarifications, and corrections).
#so 97% of ao3 fandoms are eligible for yuletide (@sophia-helix )
I love this way of looking at it! :)
And for the commenters who are sad for all the tiny fandoms out there -- every fandom on AO3 starts with a first fanwork! Some of these fandoms will grow. And even for those that stay small -- remember that there are so many more pieces of media that don't have any fanworks. All of these tiny fandoms mean there was a piece of media (or a person) that caused someone to care so fiercely about it that they created and shared art with the world as a response. I think it's kinda wonderful how many times that has happened.
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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.
New Canonicals!
1. Edging
For a long while, there has been some confusion caused by the fact that we have a canonical for Edgeplay, but not for Edging which has led to some unintentional mistagging and other challenges. Consequently, we will be creating a canonical tag for Edging with the format Orgasm Edging and this new canonical tag will be subtagged to Orgasm Control.
Relatedly, we will be reorganizing the Orgasm Control tag tree to allow for easier and more straightforward filtering and renaming Edgeplay to add clarity. You’ll find more details regarding these changes in the Renamed and Reorganized canonicals section below.
2. Generative AI
We have canonized three tags related to Generative AI.
Created Using Generative AI
AI-Generated Text
AI-Generated Images
All tags which make mention of specific Generative AI tools will be made a synonym of the most relevant AI-Generated canonical. Additionally, please note that AI-Generated Text and AI-Generated Images will be subtagged to Created Using Generative AI.
How to Use These To Filter For/Filter Out Works Tagged as Using Generative AI:
❌ Filtering Out:
To filter out all works that use tags about being created with AI, add Created Using Generative AI to the “other tags to exclude” field in the works filter. This will also exclude works making use of the subtags AI-Generated Text and AI-Generated Images. If you wish to exclude either the Images or Text tags only, you can do so by excluding either AI-Generated Text or AI-Generated Images.
☑️ Filtering For:
Add Created Using Generative AI to the “other tags to include” field in the works filter. This will also automatically include the works making use of the subtags AI-Generated Text and AI-Generated Images. If you wish to filter for Images or Text only, you can do so by including either AI-Generated Text or AI-Generated Images only .
As a reminder, the use of these tools in the creation of works is not against AO3's ToS. These new tags exist purely to help folks curate their own experience on the Archive. If you would like to see more information about AO3’s policies in regards to AI generated works, please see our News post from May 2023 on AI and Data Scraping on the Archive.
Renamed and Reevaluated Canonicals!
3. EdgeplayAs mentioned above, we will be renaming Edgeplay to clarify the tag's meaning, given that it is often confused for Edging. This tag will be decanonized and made a synonym of Edgeplay | High Risk BDSM Practices. It will be removed as a subtag of Sensation Play and be subtagged instead directly to BDSM. Please note if you have made use of the Edgeplay tag on your works or wish to continue to use it in the future, you are still welcome to do so.
The tag Edgeplay will be made a synonym of the new canonical, so all works tagged with Edgeplay now or in the future will fall under the new tag so that they’re still easy for users to find. If you have made it a favorite tag, it will be transferred automatically when we make this change.
4. Orgasm Delay/Denial
The tag Orgasm Delay/Denial will be decanonized and made a synonym of Orgasm Control to help limit confusion with the more specific Orgasm Delay and Orgasm Denial canonicals. Tags that are currently synonyms of Orgasm Delay/Denial are being analyzed and moved to either Orgasm Control or Orgasm Delay or Orgasm Denial or Orgasm Edging.
The revised tree structure for this tree will feature Orgasm Control as the top-level metatag with subtags Orgasm Edging, Orgasm Delay, and Orgasm Denial. So, if you wish to filter for all these tags at once, you can do so just by filtering for Orgasm Control.
5. Female Ejaculation
Female Ejaculation will be decanonized and made a synonym of Squirting and Vaginal Ejaculation. We hope this new phrasing will be more inclusive, clear, and make the tag easier to find whether users are searching for Squirting or the previous canonical. All current synonyms of Female Ejaculation will also be made a synonym of Squirting and Vaginal Ejaculation, including Squirting. You may continue to tag your works as suits your preferences, and we will make sure these tags are made synonyms of the new canonical so that your work can be found in the filters for it.
These are just some of the changes being implemented. While we won’t be announcing every change, you can expect similar updates in the future as we continue to work toward improving the Archive experience. So if you have an interest in the changes we’ll be making, you can follow us on Twitter @ao3_wranglers or keep an eye on this Tumblr for future announcements.
Thank you for your patience and understanding as we continue our work!
(From time to time, ao3org posts announcements of recent or upcoming wrangling changes on behalf of the Tag Wrangling Committee.)
Tag update info that may be useful for people who want to include/exclude any of the following from their AO3 searches, or who use related tags on their own fanworks -- and also folks doing fandom stats/research related to the following:
Orgasm Control (including Orgasm Edging)
Edgeplay | High Risk BDSM Practices
Squirting and Vaginal Ejaculation
Created Using Generative AI
Edit: also let's give a hand to the tag wranglers, who are working to help with smut language disambiguation, smut gender inclusivity, and the hottest fandom discourse topics all at the same time! 😂😂😂👏👏👏
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.
Specifically, I'm trying to label AO3 activity spikes with what episodes/events seemed to contribute to them. But I'm probably missing important context. E.g., I know there were other events like fanwork exchanges happening that might have been contributors to some activity spikes, or things the show creators said/did might also have contributed sometimes.
If you have theories about why the red spikes between seasons happened near the following dates, that would be excellent:
Dec 28, 2020
May 11, 2020
Oct 5, 2015
Sept 29, 2014
July 21, 2014
And if you think I'm missing important context for some of the other spikes, or I made goofs on some of the labels, please LMK!
This was posted on April 10, 2024; I'm hoping for relevant replies in the next few days.
If you prefer to look at the raw data, it's too long to list here, but you can read it in this spreadsheet. And you can view the graph and labels bigger in this slide.
Thanks so much in advance!!
(If you have questions or critiques, please click through and read more context on AO3 or click through to the OP version of this post, which I will update with clarifications as needed.)
The graphs above look at all TV fandoms on AO3 with fanworks numbering above 10k. The full list of 56 is found above, ordered from biggest to smallest.
Fandoms on the rise in 2022
Stranger Things (TV 2016): 13.1%
Our Flag Means Death (TV): 7.8%
The Umbrella Academy (TV): 2.0%
The Vampire Diaries (TV): 0.5%
Hannibal (TV): 0.3%
Star Trek: 0.3%
Star Trek: The Original Series: 0.3%
Game of Thrones (TV): 0.3%
DCU: 0.3%
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: 0.3%
Declining Fandoms
The Witcher (TV): -1.3%
Daredevil (TV): -0.7%
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (TV): -0.7%
Law & Order: SVU: -0.4%
Good Omens (TV): -0.3%
Shameless (US): -0.2%
9-1-1 (TV): -0.2%
Doctor Who (2005): -0.2%
numbers indicate the difference between average monthly new/updated fanworks in Jan-Apr 2022 and in May-Aug 2022, as a percentage of total fanworks in that fandom.
The majority (32) of these big fandoms are relatively steady, with -0.1% to 0.1% change in output between Jan-Apr and May-Aug, as a percentage of total.
Supply vs Demand
Supply is measured by the total number of new fanworks in August.
Demand: there's no real way to measure demand, but I figured kudos are a good approximation. The graph above shows the median number of kudos left on fanworks created in August. (nb, in order not to muddy the data with older, multi-chapter works, only single-chapter complete works were included in kudos data).
Correlation?
I thought there might be a correlation between supply & demand, i.e., fandoms 'on the rise' might see an increased number of kudos. From the limited data collected, this appears to not quite be the case. For example, 9-1-1 has the highest median kudos of those fandoms examined, at 122, but its output has been declining, on average, in 2022.
More data would of course give a clearer picture, but collecting data on kudos has to be done manually, and is time-intensive, so I selected a subset of fandoms representing those with recent increases, those on the decline, and those which are relatively stable.
Data collected 31 August 2022 using a combination of AO3′s search facilities and @destinationtoast‘s python scripts. Please also read her notes on the limitations of the methodology. DM me for raw data if you're interested.
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(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:
So I wrote a python script that pulls the number of fics per fandom off the AO3 fandom pages and then another script that writes the data to a Google Sheet which is then connected to a DataStudio dashboard. My plan is to collect this data weekly so you can see things like trends over time and also fastest growing fandoms (% increase of fics WoW). I'll share once I have a little more data but right now I'm running it manually every Monday. Is there a way to automate that process for free? (Ideally one where my comp doesn't have to be on all the time?)
That sounds very cool! Looking forward to seeing it when you get to the point where you want to share. :)
I suspect any way of automating the process will either require using your own computer or paying money for cloud hosting. But I'll throw the question to my readers in case they have suggestions!
Google Cloud Platform has a generous free tier. You can run Cloud Function for free (as long as it's not run like 1000's of times a day). Cloud Functions run small snippets of code as long as the execute in under 7 minutes. They are stateless so you would need to have both the scraping and writing to a Google sheet happen in the same function, or write to Google Cloud storage bucket (not a bad idea anyways) in between. Cloud Scheduler acts as a cron job, scheduling when to trigger the functions. You might also consider writing to Bigquery as well.
You will need to put in a credit card but I've setup nearly identical pipeline in the past so totally doable for free. Feel free to DM if you have questions.
Since it's been a while -- just wanted to update that I'm still working on this! Here's a sneak peek:
(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.
Bigger fandoms (1K+ works) with highest % tagged "Trans" or a subtag
Format is fandom name, then percent of works that are tagged "Trans", then number of works that are tagged "Trans":
Druck | SKAM (Germany) 18.93% 255
Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator 13.57% 182
The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys: California (Comics) 9.71% 110
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An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
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.
Afrikaans • العربية • Bahasa Indonesia • Български • বাংলা • català • Cymraeg • dansk • Deutsch • Ελληνικά • English • español • français • 한국어 • हिंदी • hrvatski • italiano • עברית • lietuvių kalba • magyar • Malay • मराठी • Nederlands • 日本語 • norsk • polski • português brasileiro • português europeu • Română • Русский • slovenčina • slovenščina • српски • suomi • svenska • ไทย • Tiếng Việt • Türkçe • Українська • 中文
I’ve seen some disappointed reactions about this, and one thing that is brought up frequently is tagging for triggers and warnings. A lot of people are worried the 75 tag limit will prevent them from tagging all variations of trigger tags.
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
Bonus protip: the “sexual content” tag is much better than the “smut” tag for filtering out smut if that’s not your cup of tea. It has a crazy amount of subtags.
This is a great insight. Thank you so much for sharing it! And one reason why this is possible on AO3 is because of the Tag Wrangling team. Actual humans look at your tags and can match them up appropriately under parent tags - so even if your tag isn’t listed but it’s clear what it means, it will still be categorized correctly.
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.
75 tags is actually quite a lot and if you read the linked news post you’ll see just how few fics even get close to that number. We might need to start making choices about which tags to include, but for the most part we’ll all be just fine.
Some folks on Twitter dug into the data dump from March of 2021, to look at what fics would be most affected by this. Twitter user @GenmaichaGreen has a thread here, and Twitter user @ladyofthelog has a pretty Tableau workbook here.
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.
TL;DR: half the works that are overtagged are either crossovers or pile-ups, and frankly, the pile-ups are an example of works this policy is trying to target as a problem.
Fanlore is now on Discord! After a period of closed beta, we’re opening up our official Discord server for everyone to join!
Have any questions about Fanlore, wiki editing, or our upcoming annual Stub September event? Want to share the fun facts you discover while browsing the wiki? Come join the fun here! We’re excited to chat with you!
Utility for downloading fanfiction in bulk from the Archive of Our Own - GitHub - nianeyna/ao3downloader: Utility for downloading fanfiction
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.
note: this is a standalone desktop app that DOES NOT DO ANYTHING aside from automate clicking on buttons on the ao3 website. Everything this script does, can be done by hand using ao3's regular features. It is just a utility to facilitate personal backups for offline reading - there's no website or server, I have no access to or indeed interest in the fics other people download using this. No plagiarism is happening here, please don't come after me.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
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.
Afrikaans • العربية • Bahasa Indonesia • Български • বাংলা • català • Cymraeg • dansk • Deutsch • Ελληνικά • English • español • français • 한국어 • हिंदी • hrvatski • italiano • עברית • lietuvių kalba • magyar • Malay • मराठी • Nederlands • 日本語 • norsk • polski • português brasileiro • português europeu • Română • Русский • slovenčina • slovenščina • српски • suomi • svenska • ไทย • Tiếng Việt • Türkçe • Українська • 中文
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Hey everyone! I’m now seriously considering the possibility of doing a followup to the AO3 Census project (i.e. a large-scale survey of the demographics and behaviours of people who use AO3) sometime in the next year or so.
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
(If this link has expired when you see this post, please DM me for an invite.)
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,
Brianna Dym
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