1/3 - Hi there! Three (I think) part ask incoming. You're the main person I know of who compiles tons of interesting fandom stats, so I wanted to ask you about it if you have the time to answer. :) I think a lot about how AO3 works great as a fan*fic* archive, but for other fanworks, like images, audio, video, etc., it's only as good as wherever the media is being hosted. With the way hosting sites come and go, or change their TOS to nuke nsfw or queer content, etc., it makes me wonder
how many broken image links litter AO3 at this point. I know it's not considered the primary place to find fanart, but a lot of folks do post images there—for events like Big Bangs, as standalone art, and even as decorative section breaks, etc. My question is: do you think there's a way to look at, say, works tagged with #fanart (of which there are 99,504 atm) and determine what percentage of those are broken links? From what little I understand, one would have to (perhaps with the use of a simple bot?) try to open any link bordered by the <img src> html, and see what portion of those return an error versus what ones actually load? I suppose it could even be something like looking at fanart posted in 2007, 2012, 2017, and 2022 to compare how many older links are broken versus newer links. Anyway, this may be completely unfeasible, but I figured I'd ask about your thoughts! Thanks!
Ooh, thanks for the great question! I took a while to answer because I wasn't initially sure what to recommend and ended up gathering some data to investigate. (If anyone else also has relevant data, please share in the notes!)
I liked your idea of looking at samples different years going back, and I decided to look through 100 AO3 works tagged "Fanart" (or a subtag) that were posted 10 years ago -- as a very fast starting point, I didn't even take a random sample of works, I instead looked at the first 100 multimedia fanworks posted in July 2014. (And August, when necessary; see more notes on methodology at the end.) Please keep in mind that this sample that may not be very representative of AO3 more broadly; to get better estimates, more sampling would be needed. Based on this initial data gathering (and the fact that most fanworks on AO3 were posted within the past 10 years), I would tentatively guess that that most fanart, fanvids, and podfic on AO3 still have accessible multimedia.
Given how many broken links and embeds there are on older webpages, I assumed that a ton of the links from 10 years ago would be broken. But I was pleasantly surprised by the results:
Wow -- 10 years on roughly 90% of the multimedia still works! I was honestly floored; I'd been originally planning to also look at 5 years ago to see how much better that was, but if ~90% are still working 10 years on, 5 years ago doesn't have room to be dramatically better. (However, I'd love to see more follow up sampling across different years to find out.)
There were a lot of AO3 users in this sample who posted multiple works -- some posted as many as a dozen multimedia works in July 2014. I didn't want the results to be overly skewed by any one fanwork creator, so I also redid the analysis with just one work from each unique creator:
Okay, cool, those results are pretty similar. I also did some further breakdowns on this smaller set of works to look at which hosts creators were using, and how many of the hosts were still working:
The most common fanart host used in this sample was Tumblr, then wixmp -- which I think from some very quick googling might be because Deviantart switched to using Wix for image hosting at some point? (i.e., I think most of those artists may have posted their art on Deviantart, then linked to/embedded the image on AO3, and the image's direct URL was was wixmp.) There were a few other hosts at the time that were used by 5+ different artists in the sample, and then there were a whole lot of hosts were used by just one or a few artists.
Most of the 10-year-old fanart is still up for all of these hosting categories! Photobucket is the least reliable of the most commonly used hosts. In the Other category, 25% of the links are broken, but that's still better than I expected (see full host list here).
This is getting long, so I'm moving the breakdowns for fanvids and podfic beneath the cut:
Fanvids were almost all hosted on YouTube, Vimeo, or both (the above categories are not mutually exclusive). All the Vimeo links still worked, whether they required a password to view or not. Most YouTube links were working, and the few missing ones had almost all been taken down by YouTube for copyright reasons (according to the errors I got -- I'm not rendering judgment about whether they were actually fair use), rather than by the vidder who posted it. And almost a third of vidders also linked to other hosts besides the big two, but many of those links were broken; 59% still worked. (see full host list here)
