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Wattpad: a quick first stab at category breakdown
I recently posted new stats about Wattpad and wondered (not for the first time) about the breakdown of stories across different categories on their site. The limited Wattpad search functions don’t allow me to measure that directly (unlike on AO3 and FFN). Wattpad has told me that their biggest categories are Fanfiction and Romance, but beyond that, I don’t know anything about their relative sizes.
But it just occurred to me that I do have some data about the rate with which users post to each category. Wattpad lets you filter a category approximately by date, and you can view up to 100 pages of search results -- that’s 1500 results. I decided to look at how long it takes to get 1500 works in each category and use that to estimate sizes of categories.
As a reminder, here are the categories offered by Wattpad:
First I discarded the “Classics” category, which turns out to be mostly empty (probably because it’s advertised as being for works originally published over 100 years ago??). Then I looked at the earliest date on the 100th page of search results for each category (sorted by date). (Raw data)
(The data I gathered today is probably above average (since fandom is usually especially active on Sunday), but I’m using it as a first guess; I could improve it by sampling over time.)
For four of the categories, the earliest date was today -- meaning that these four categories (Fanfiction, Romance, Teen Fiction, and Random) generated 1500+ new works today alone. I graphed the estimated rates of works/day above (top of post).
A quick note: from these numbers, it appears that Wattpad users create at least 11K works per day total (not just fanfic). This may be a substantial over- or underestimate. But for comparison, I calculate that AO3 users currently produce about 2K works per day averaged over the past month. Even if the Wattpad numbers are several times larger on Sunday than other days of the week, it looks like Wattpad is growing faster than AO3 if you count all categories. The Fanfiction category -- if it is actually producing 1500+ posts per day -- may be outpacing AO3 all on its own.
Okay, so, the top four categories above are almost certainly underestimates. But let’s imagine for a moment that they each product 1500 works/day, and that that’s been pretty typical of the category rates over time. Then the category breakdown would look like this:
Each of the top four categories would comprise 13% of Wattpad.
But we know that Fanfiction is the biggest category, and Romance is the second biggest. Depending on how much of an underestimate these rates are, the category sizes could vary wildly. I graphed several hypothetical but consistent datasets to illustrate what I mean:
So, basically, we really don’t know!
But at least we have some possible lower bounds on some of the category sizes (again, with a bunch of caveats that my rate data may not be representative, and the rate may have varied a lot over time).
Feedback on methodology & alternate suggestions welcome. Also tagging wattpad in case they want to officially chip in.