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mugenmine asked:
Hello Toasty! Firstly, thank you for all of the stats and fandom analysis. I am a data fiend so I really appreciate the work that you do :-) I was wondering if you were planning to do fandom analysis on Wattpad? Your AO3/FF stats are extremely interesting and very informative. I was just wondering what the lay of the land looked like over there in Wattpad land. Keep up the awesomeness!
This is a great question! I hadn’t played around with Wattpad at all, so I spent a while just now poking around. (I am by no means an expert at this point; please, folks with Wattpad experience, make suggestions or corrections!)
Edit: I screwed up some of the FFN numbers the first time around; now have (I believe) corrected the erroneous data. But if you spot more numbers that seem out of whack, please let me know!
Wattpad takes all types of fiction, not just fanfic, but for my purposes I just looked at the Fan Fiction category. It appears that Wattpad is more poorly organized than AO3 or FFN, and there are limited ways to search or sort. For instance, there isn’t a distinct category for “Sherlock”, but if you search for that word, it will return all works that contain that word (I think? it’s unclear) and give you a breakdown of how many times it occurs in the top 3 categories, as well as popular tags:
The first thing I was curious about is which fandoms are most common on each of the platforms (see methodology details below). I chose 25 30 fandoms that had a high total number of fanworks across all three platforms, and I looked at the breakdowns:
(Sorry for the near illegibility — see the raw data below. Some of these are abbreviations; I used the canonical tag for each on AO3 and FFN.)
Holy crap, there’s a lot of Harry Potter fanfic on FFN. Also a lot of Naruto and Twilight. Let’s remove those for now. We’ll rescale the axes, so we can better see the rest of them:
This is still hard to see; sorry. Here are the raw numbers — please let me know if you spot errors:
My main (tentative) takeaways are the following:
- The three platforms have largely very different focuses.
- AO3 focuses more on TV shows.
- FFN focuses more on anime and games.
- Wattpad focuses
exclusively on One Directionmore on boy bands and young male musicians.
Other things I notice about Wattpad: it lets you sort by “Hot”, “New”, “Undiscovered”, and “Completed.” It doesn’t say what exactly “Hot” signifies, but there are numbers of reads, favorites, and comments listed for each work.
The most popular 1D fic I could find is really fricking popular:
….Dude, that’s a lot of reads. For comparison, on AO3 the top numbers are the following:
- Hits: 392372 (0.7% of the reads for the Wattpad 1D fic above)
- Kudos: 11136
- Comments: 16592
- Bookmarks: 4700
Thanks for the great question! I may have gotten a little carried away with it. :D
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Methodology for selecting fandoms: It was a bit handwavy, but… FFN makes it easy to see the most common fandoms in each genre, so I grabbed the top 5-10 from each genre. And I already did an analysis a while back of common fandoms on AO3 (which I would do differently now that I understand AO3 tagging better… but still, I used it as a basis to select the top bunch of fandoms from AO3). With Wattpad, there was no way to sort by fandom size, so I was stuck searching for things that seemed like they might be popular, plus fandoms that were popular on the other platforms. I’m sure someone more tuned into Wattpad could spot some I’ve missed! Please do point those out, if you can. Anyway, I searched for all of those fandoms on each of the platforms, wrote down the totals (just the Fan Fiction total in the case of Wattpad), and then chose the top 30 overall. Some popular ones may be (probably are) missing.