#fandom size

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. 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.

Good question! 

I actually really don’t know. I know we’re small, comparatively, but I also know we’re growing. There are also probably casual shippers who side-eye some of their shenanigans on the show, but don’t actively participate in the fandom. 

I’d actually be really interested in getting an idea of how far the Rhink seed has spread, because goodness knows they provide a ton of shipping fodder. I mean…. we’re seriously spoiled.

Hey – thanks for your lovely note!  And belated happy new year to you as well.  :D

Good question!  As with so many things, fandom size follows a power law – most fandoms have few fanworks, while relatively few are large.  But I didn’t have exact numbers, until I ran an analysis just now:

The fandom size is on the x-axis (log scale to make it easier to see the line).  This graph says that 35% of the fandoms on AO3 have only 1 fanwork.  62% of fandoms have 5 or fewer fanworks, and so on.  While there are a few fandoms with over 100K fanworks, I stopped the graph there, because almost all fandoms have fewer than that – in fact, less than 1% of fandoms have 10K or more fanworks!

While one could feel sad for all the fandoms with only 1 fanwork, here are a few things to remember that cheer me up: 

Sometimes people misunderstand fandom tags and stick other things in there instead.  E.g., “(prolly the film but shoot ur fuckin shot my dude!)“ and other quirky items which can be found in Uncategorized Fandoms.  (Although I actually did exclude “Uncategorized Fandoms” from this particular analysis, so I guess that’s not adding to the above stats.)

Sometimes people use different names for the same fandom, and the AO3 tag wranglers haven’t gotten around to uniting them all yet.  E.g., I wrote a fic with the fandom tag “Ana Ng - They Might Be Giants (Song)” which was initially just in its own little fandom, but eventually got wrangled under They Might Be Giants, which is itself within Bandom (so now it’s in those larger fandoms, too).

Which brings me to another point: for some of the fandoms that have only one work in them, that fanwork also belongs to bigger fandoms.

Sorry, nonny… I think you asked me this at least a week ago. I meant to go try and do some stats on the topic, but haven’t had a chance. (Has anyone else done relevant stats, readers?) So I’ll just say that yes, intuitively this makes sense to me.