Work Text:
Continuing on with the data I used to compare shipping on Wattpad vs. AO3 and FFN, I wanted to look at genre on Wattpad vs. other platforms as well -- but each of the three major platforms I've looked at work differently:
- Wattpad has 22 genres and requires exactly one genre per work. Wattpad is open to non-fanworks -- "Fanfiction" is just one of its genres. Wattpad additionally allows freeform tagging, like AO3 does. However, Wattpad doesn't have tag wranglers organizing related tags (the way AO3 does), so it can be harder to find things by tag than on AO3. 76% of Wattpad works use at least one freeform tag, and I may analyze those tags separately from genre in the future.
- FFN has 21 genres, and fanworks can have up to two genres. Most FFN works have two genres, but some don't have any. FFN does not offer freeform tagging.
- AO3 does not organize works into a limited set of genres, it only has freeform tagging. Because of this, I omitted AO3 from this analysis.
As we will see, there are many differences between FFN and Wattpad's genres, though they overlap somewhat. But before we get to comparisons, let's start out looking at Wattpad:
This analysis is based on the official genre listed for each of 5292 randomly sampled Wattpad works. And what are all those tinier, unlabeled slices? Don't worry, we'll get back to them.
But first -- is the "Fanfiction" genre label accurate? I asked a bunch of awesome volunteers to hand-categorize 2000 of the works so we could find out. You can read more about this process in my previous Wattpad analysis.
When the category was unclear, volunteers often did some research on character names to try to determine whether something was a fanwork or an original work, but note that these are best guesses. There are undoubtedly errors, especially when the volunteer was not familiar with the culture and/or language of the work (volunteers were provided with translations of titles, summaries, and other metadata).
Note also that these slices don’t add up to exactly the same as the blue slice on the previous slide, because this is taken from a different (smaller) sample of works.
And what about the works that have a genre other than Fanfiction? Are any of those fanworks?
Aha -- so a lot of these are fanworks! :) It does not surprise me that a lot of creators might choose other genres to help specify what to expect from their fanwork.
There are also a lot of works which volunteers were uncertain about. As well as cultural & language differences, the question of whether something is a fanwork is sometimes difficult because of works that blur the lines. For instance, some Wattpad works contain characters with an accompanying "cast list" of celebrities to "play" the characters, or they use pictures of celebrities to illustrate a story. Depending on how related the characters and the celebrities are, this can look more or less like an AU fanwork.
*Since these estimates are based on a sample of 2000 fanworks, there is a 99% confidence level that these analyses generalize to Wattpad overall, but there is a +/- 5% margin of error.
Okay, so if nearly 1/3 of fanworks are in other genres besides Fanfiction, what genres do those fanworks use?
We can see that, with only a few exceptions, the ranking of the genres is the same for fanworks as for Wattpad overall. Note that because the sample of fanworks was relatively small, some of the genres are missing. Some fanworks probably do use those genres; we just don't have enough data here to have seen it happening.
And how do the Wattpad genres compare to the FFN genres?
The FFN data was calculated based on a sample of 3978 FFN works, of which 3613 had at least one genre listed. Recall that most FFN works have two genres, which is why the percentages add up to over 100%.
Note: the left side shows genre usage across all of Wattpad, not just the fanworks. I chose to do this because it's a much larger sample containing more genres. Also because we saw in the last slide that, with a few exceptions, the ranking of genres for fanworks is similar to the rest of Wattpad.
Where the two platforms do not overlap, FFN looks more like AO3 than Wattpad does. AO3 has a lot of the FFN-only genres as popular tags (e.g., "Angst," "Hurt/Comfort"). By contrast, AO3 has almost no usage of tags equivalent to the Wattpad-only genres ("Teen Fiction" and "Chick Lit" have, at most, dozens of uses on AO3). This may simply be a result of many people having migrated from FFN to AO3. But possibly fans more broadly tend to prefer tags that describe emotional or relationship dynamics (e.g., "Angst," "Fluff") to tags describing the demographics of the intended audience.
Despite the differences, there are some genres that are the same or very similar between the two platforms. What if we compare usage of just those genres?
For this analysis, I’ve discarded all works that don’t use at least one of these genres. Because FFN allows two genres, fanworks on FFN have an average of 1.7 genres, so I also normalized to make both sets of genres add up to 100% (however, I removed the labels on the bar graphs, because the specific percentages are pretty meaningless after those transformations).
Here's how I generated the genres that didn't have an exact match on both platforms (marked with an asterisk above):
- Action & Adventure -- Action + Adventure on Wattpad vs. Adventure on FFN
- Humor & Parody -- Humor on Wattpad vs. Humor + Parody on FFN
- Supernatural -- Paranormal + Vampire + Werewolf on Wattpad vs. Supernatural on FFN
- Mystery & Suspense -- Mystery/Thriller on Wattpad (that's all one genre) vs. Mystery + Suspense + Crime on FFN
You might reasonably disagree with some of the groupings above and get somewhat different results. If we disallow groupings and just compare genres one-on-one, the Humor vs. Humor and Supernatural vs. Paranormal comparisons still yield similar results to the graph above. But Suspense + Crime together are as big as Mystery on FFN, so removing those makes a big difference in that comparison. And Action is over 70% as large as Adventure on Wattpad, so again, separating those genres changes things substantially.
In any case, it's not clear how much these differences reflect true differences in content vs. differences in how authors choose to categorize things. For instance, does FFN really have relatively less fantasy, sci-fi, supernatural, and horror than Wattpad? I'm dubious. It seems possible, for instance, that many of the canons that fans write about on FFN fall into one of those genres, and users don't feel the need to tag for a genre that the canon already has. But that's just a hypothesis. The main point is that we would need to do more research before concluding anything about the actual numbers of works that contain humor, fantasy elements, etc.
A few miscellaneous notes:
- New genres have presumably been added over time to both platforms, so some of these are probably more or less common as a result of how long they’ve been around.
- I suspect that many of the humorous works on Wattpad may end up in the Random genre, based on a bit of browsing and some categorization of sampled works, but I haven't quantified this. More generally, I would like to try to understand better how people are using the Random genre.
- There's way more Poetry on Wattpad than FFN (though, as noted, not nearly as much Poetry when you look just at the fanworks). It's worth noting that FFN has a sister site, FictionPress.com, intended for original writing, and that site has a huge amount of poetry -- more poetry than prose, according to Wikipedia.
Thanks for reading -- there are more Wattpad analyses yet to come, as detailed in the previous work.