Work Text:
Do genre shows produce more fanfic?
Someone (I forget who -- sorry! ) recently was pondering why dramas don't get as much fanfic as sci-fi and fantasy shows. I wondered if this was true; I suspected it was, but I also thought maybe this was just due to what's popular on TV right now, or maybe AO3 was especially biased toward SF/F. So, naturally, I did some stats. :)
Choosing TV shows
I wanted to look at recent popular shows (in part because AO3 hasn't been around too long, and in part because I wanted to test a hypothesis that fanfic amount correlates with viewership). So I went looking for a list of recent popular shows. I combined the top 50 shows from the TV Guide top shows and the EW top 50 most watched shows for 2013-2014. (I don't understand the methodology behind the making of these lists; sorry. There are obviously some popular TV shows with lively fandoms that did not make these lists.) The EW list came with viewership numbers, which was handy for some analyses. I removed duplicates and shows that ended almost immediately and/or hadn't been around at least a year. I also removed all non-fiction shows (Sports, News, and Reality genres).
Getting fanfic numbers
I looked at the AO3 TV Shows fandoms list and FFN TV fandoms list and copied down the numbers listed next to the TV show names there.
Q1: Which genres of shows are most popular?
Let's start by looking at the top 30 shows from the EW list (after I weeded out some, as described above), so we can sort by viewership numbers:
I've color coded by genre (consulting Wikipedia where I was uncertain; take these classifications with ample salt). From this list, it looks like crime dramas/police procedurals (green) mostly top the list, followed by a mix of comedies (orange) and non-genre dramas (red). The popular sci-fi/fantasy (purple) and thrillers (pink) shows on this list tend to get fewer viewers.
(Note that a number of popular shows in the TV Guide top 50 are missing from this EW list; the TV Guide list also includes content from premium channels like HBO, for one thing.)
Q2: Do sci-fi/fantasy shows produce more fanfic than dramas?
First I looked at the total number of fanfic on AO3 and FFN combined, and found the 30 most fanfic-producing shows from the original list:
This list shows a much different genre preference than the list above, with crime dramas and SF/F topping the list, and most non-genre dramas toward the bottom.
But! Some of these shows have been around a lot longer than others. So instead, let's compare the yearly amount of fic produced by each fandom. I divided AO3 and FFN totals by the number of years the show has been around. In the case of AO3, I maxed out this number of years at 5, because AO3 only became available for posting in 2009 -- this is a bit dubious, because hardly anyone posted in 2009 and the archive has grown a lot every year since; and also because I just subtracted the year of the first airdate from 2014, so these are not very accurate numbers of years. But let's say that this gives us a rough idea of how active each of these fandoms are on these two major archives:
Now we see an even stronger preference for producing fanfic for genre shows, and SF/F are at the top for most active.
Q3: do AO3 and FFN have different active fandoms?
Let's look again at the most active TV fandoms from the above list (in terms of fanfic produced per year), but break it down by archive:
From these top 10 lists, it looks like AO3 may favor sci-fi and fantasy TV shows more than FFN does.
Q4: Can you predict the amount of fanfic production from the show viewership?
Not according to the EW data set, anyway:
There's no correlation here (R^2 = 0.001). It looks the most popular shows in terms of viewerships (15M+) all have reasonably active fandoms (1K+ fics per year). But there doesn't seem to be any other pattern among these popular TV shows.
Final thoughts
These results might not be too surprising to folks who've been in fandom longer or watching TV trends more carefully than I have. :) I'd love feedback if you spot anything errors or things I missed.
This doesn't actually get at the original, more interesting question of WHY these genres have the most active fandoms. I look forward to discussion about that!
Here's the raw data if you want to play with it.