Work Text:
When I share data about fanworks on AO3, I often limit my analyses to the biggest fandoms. I generally do that because it's quicker to collect data about and analyze just the biggest fandoms. But I wanted to take a moment now to visualize the sizes of different fandoms on AO3 in a couple different ways -- and to highlight just how many of the fandoms on AO3 are smaller fandoms.
AO3 says there are more than 63,310 fandoms on AO3 right now. Looking at just the fandoms listed here that currently have at least one public fanwork, I was able to find 58,242 fandoms (or more accurately, that many fandom tags -- that includes broad tags like "Real Person Fiction" that are mostly used for wrangling/organizing more specific fandoms). I suspect some of the "missing" fandoms either have only private fanworks or had fanworks that were deleted.
I visualized the sizes of those 58K fandoms in two different ways. First, a bar graph -- the X axis shows the number of public fanworks (with varying size buckets). The Y axis shows the number of fandoms with that many works (and, in parentheses, the percent of AO3 fandoms that number represents):
Caption: A graph made from the following data: Number of public fanworks Number of fandoms Percent of fandoms 1 19094 32.8% 2-3 11773 20.2% 4-10 10504 18.0% 11-30 6600 11.3% 31-100 4590 7.9% 101-300 2554 4.4% 301-1000 784 1.3% 3-10K 427 0.7% 10-30K 196 0.3% 30-100K 91 0.16% 100-300K 19 0.03% 300K+ 6 0.01%
Note that over 19,000 fandoms -- a full 33% of fandoms on AO3 -- contain only one fanwork. If you've posted the first/only fanwork in a fandom, you're far from alone! And nearly 12,000 more fandoms -- an additional 20% of fandoms -- have only 2 or 3 fanworks. Most fandoms on AO3 are very small fandoms. Some of these tiny fandom tags will eventually be wrangled together/made a synonym of a more common fandom tag. But a bunch of them are truly media properties that just one or a few people have shared fanworks for at this point.
The list of fandom tags and their sizes is here. (And if you want more analysis of the current largest and fastest growing fandom tags -- only including the ones that people commonly use, omitting the broader tags like "Real Person Fiction" -- check out my recent analysis.)
Secondly, I visualized the data a different way, showing the percentage of fandoms (Y axis) that have less than or equal to the number of public fanworks shown on the X axis. Because many people have found this style of graph more confusing when I've used them in the past, I've called out and explained some of the data points.
Caption: A graph made from the following data: Max number of fanworks Cumulative percent of fandoms 1 32.78% 2 45.79% 3 53.00% 4 57.78% 5 61.29% 10 71.03% 20 78.64% 50 86.17% 100 90.25% 200 93.31% 500 95.92% 1000 97.39% 2000 98.29% 5000 99.11% 10000 99.46% 20000 99.71% 50000 99.87% 100000 99.96% 200000 99.98% 500000 99.99% 1000000 100.00%
Some key points of the graph, as noted in the callouts:
- 33% of fandoms have 1 work
- 71% of fandoms have ≤ 10 works
- 90% of fandoms have ≤ 100 works
- 97% of fandoms have ≤ 1000 works
- 99% of fandoms have ≤ 10,000 works
This graph really highlights what a tiny portion of the fandoms on AO3 I am including when I only analyze fandoms with 10K+ fanworks. Those big fandoms jointly contain millions of fanworks, but there are so very many fandoms and fanworks they miss!