Chapter Text
Introduction & Goal:
For various reasons, I was looking at the 2010 Graph of fandoms by category on FanFiction.net and I thought it might be interesting to do an update by comparing them. The inspiration was an older graph located here: Fanlore 2010 Fandoms by Media Type and specifically part of this page: FanLore FanFiction.net Page . After generating a new chart, I was then curious about what the original numbers were in the 2010 chart, since they were not present and also rounded by percentage in the graph; so I built a second chart based on stats from 2009 I was able to obtain.
Graphs:
Methodology:
The numbers I was using was from the categories index on FanFiction.net, located on the front page.
I ignored the crossover categories since that should be in theory just duplicating things.
|
Category |
Number of Fandoms November 2020 |
November 2020 % of Fandoms |
Fanlore % listing (likely 2010 and rounded.) |
Number of fandoms October 2009 |
October 2009 % of fandoms |
|
Anime |
2081 |
17.31% |
19 |
812 |
18.93% |
|
Books |
2528 |
21.03% |
21 |
873 |
20.35% |
|
Cartoons |
634 |
5.27% |
6 |
278 |
6.48% |
|
Comics |
300 |
2.50% |
2 |
97 |
2.26% |
|
Games |
1623 |
13.50% |
12 |
542 |
12.64% |
|
Misc |
42 |
0.35% |
0.7 |
30 |
0.70% |
|
Movies |
2202 |
18.32% |
18 |
745 |
17.37% |
|
Plays |
197 |
1.64% |
1.5 |
63 |
1.47% |
|
TV |
2412 |
20.07% |
20 |
849 |
19.79% |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Total |
12019 |
|
|
4289 |
|
Notes:
Overall the percentages are pretty similar only going up or down 2% at most.
Please note this just reflects the number of fandoms, not the number of works in those fandoms.
Interesting note on miscellaneous - some of what it currently includes are also crossover tags, such as Buffy X-Overs and DragonBall/Sailor Moon, which has over 1.1 k of work that display in the default index*. However, as this wasn't in the separate crossover category I still counted these known crossover fandoms that were located in miscellaneous for consistency.
To clarify, the miscellaneous category also includes categories such as Manhwa/Korean Comics/만화 (2K) and Misc. Anime/Manga (8.9K) so the overall number of fandoms on FanFiction.net is much higher than what is reflected in the "official number" of fandoms, but there is no simple way to see what is reflected in these bulk categories.
*In regards to the default indexes on FanFiction.net, in my personal experience there’s usually more fanworks if you look more closely, as while FF.net does allow mature work (but not explicit), the mature works are usually automatically filtered out of displaying in searches unless you explicitly modify the filter and are not displaying in the default counts even if they are still hosted.
Conclusions:
It is uncanny the similarity in the percentages and how little they've changed in proportions on FanFiction.net.
Although the raw numbers I’m working with are quite different the individual category percentages are all within 2% of their original values. This despite the 180.23% increase in the number of fandoms on FanFiction.net from 2009, with the total number of fandoms nearly tripling in size.
(In October 2009 there were only 4289 fandoms, whereas currently in November 2020 there are 12019; if excluding the crossover categories that aren’t in miscellaneous.)
The author was asked about their opinions, which they’ll go into in chapter 4 - however first, some hypotheses and breakdowns.