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TOASTYSTATS: FANFIC COMPLETION RATES
I discovered something interesting -- the percent of completed works is much higher on AO3 (88%) than on FFN (50%). While this may initially make it look like AO3 authors are far better at completing their works than FFN authors, I have some other theories about what’s going on.
My primary theory is that AO3 makes it easier to show a work as complete than FFN. On AO3, you say how many chapters there are, and if you’ve posted that many chapters, AO3 marks it complete for you. And since 79% of works on AO3 are single-chapter works, that automatically means that those works will be marked complete.
On FFN, by contrast, you have to explicitly select the “Complete” status. I would bet that a lot of FFN authors forget to do that. (If I’m right about that, then a lot of works on FFN are complete but are marked as WIPs -- can any fans who read a lot of works on FFN speak up about whether this matches their experience?)
If we look at which authors on AO3 have opted to mark their works as multi-chapter, we get a very different story for completion rates, which is consistent with my hypothesis:
Only 42% multi-chapter works on AO3 are complete. (Unfortunately, FFN doesn’t give the ability to separate out single chapter works from others, so we can’t do a similar breakdown on that site.)
Lest you worry over the large percentage of works that are unfinished -- as I’ve noted before, this rate does improve substantially, given enough time:
98% of works that were last revised in 2011 or earlier are complete -- and 78% of the multi-chapter works are complete. By contrast, multi-chapter works that have been revised in 2015 have only a 24% completion rate (71% overall) -- which makes sense; many of these fanworks’ authors are still working on them!
Alas, I can’t do the same breakdown on FFN; they don’t have the same ability to filter all works by date. I would guess that they would also have higher completion rates for older works than more recent ones (it just makes sense), but I don’t know how much their completion rates change.
One thing that might be artificially inflating AO3′s completion rates a bit -- a lot of authors have migrated their older works to AO3, and my guess is that they tend to mostly migrate completed works. Along similar lines, the OTW (the parent org for AO3) mass imports a bunch of fanworks to AO3 from other platforms through their Open Doors project. I’m guessing that most of what OTW imports are completed works (though I’m not sure of that). But I don’t know what percent of the AO3 fanworks have been imported via this project, so I don’t know how much the Open Doors works could be affecting the overall numbers. ( ao3org / transformativeworks, if you have any insight on the number of Archive works that were imported via Open Doors -- and/or the completion rates of those works -- please let me know! )
(P.S. wattpad, if you’d like to share completion rates for your Fanfiction genre, I’ll post a graph that includes you, too!)
Here’s the raw data for these graphs, and also for a bunch of other comparisons of AO3 and FFN that I’m in the process of posting about periodically. Feel free to run other analyses or make other visualizations from the data -- please let me know if you do so I can reshare! :)