Work Text:
Which AO3 tags are used the most? Which get the most kudos?
I took a look at the most popular freeform AO3 tags, according to this page. The graph in blue shows the tags that are used the most, while the graph in orange shows the tags that receive the most kudos on average.
The graph in blue includes all tags used at least 10,000 times on AO3. Size/color corresponds to frequency, with "Alternate Universe" having 197,012 uses. Keep in mind that a bunch of these are metatags and aren't necessarily used verbatim on AO3 works; AO3's tag wranglers group and organize related tags. (E.g., check out the synonyms and subtags of "Alternate Universe"; or consider that "Firsts" includes a number of popular tags, including "First Kiss," "First Time," and "First Meeting.")
To create the other graph, I looked at the average number of kudos for each tag (specifically, I looked at the median -- the number such that 50% of the fics have more kudos than that number, and 50% have fewer). For AO3 overall, the median number is 12 kudos. The orange graph shows every tag on the AO3 popular tag page that gets at least twice that -- at least 24 kudos on average. Size/color correspond to median number of kudos, with "Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics" receiving 113 kudos on average. Note: there may be other tags that receive more kudos on average, but are not used often enough to show up on AO3's list of popular tags.
Here are the tags that are relatively popular among both writers and readers (they have at least 5000 uses and at least 24 kudos on average):
(sorted by usage)
(same tags, sorted by kudos)
A few caveats:
- - Some tags may be missing, either through AO3 retrieval errors or my own errors.
- - None of these graphs tell the whole story of which tags are "popular". Some of the ones with low average kudos may have very high kudos per hit rate, e.g. -- meaning that a small audience tends to find works in this tag, but of the ones that do, a lot give kudos. I've written before about the difficulties and tradeoffs of various popularity metrics.
- - Correlation is not causation; using one of the more popular tags probably doesn't make a story popular.
- - The average number of kudos varies a lot across fandoms. And so do tagging norms. So it's possible that a bunch of these tags are driven largely by tagging habits in a few very popular fandoms. In some fandoms, the relative usage and kudos may look very different.
- - Apologies for typos or other errors; those are mine. :)
The raw data is here.