How many works are posted per day to our favourite fanwork archives?
As far as I know, neither AO3 nor FFnet actually track these numbers, and at the very least, they don’t publish them. But being the curious cat that I am, I couldn’t help exploit a detail of their respective structures to figure it out.
Caveats: These plots report the number of works started, whether or not they are still in draft form when the clock strikes midnight in Greenwich. The above squiggly lines report the median of daily number of works numbers assigned per fortnight, which helps smooth away some of the mess. A lot more data massaging went into getting these time series, and if you are curious about the nitty gritty, check out my post on the fandom stats livejournal community.
So, what can this graph of posting rates for the last four-ish years tell us?
Archive of Our Own has been growing like crazy. The daily posting rate these days more than 10 times that of mid 2010, from 150 to nearly 2000 by the end of 2014. So congrats to the OTW volunteers for keeping up!
Fanfiction.net is the bigger archive and continues to accumulate works faster than AO3, but it has been slowing down in the last couple of years. If these trends continue, AO3 will overtake FFNet in the next year.
Both archives show big spikes in activity around the New Year, but their activity through the rest of the year shows differeces.
So here is a plot of daily posting rates relative to the annual average for each archive.
Both archives have been most activity from the very end of December to the beginning of February, after which AO3 drops in March.
Both archives rise again through April/May.
FanFiction.Net has a sustained period of relatively more posting from the beginning of June to the end of August. This is probably from all the (North American? European? Northern Hemisphere?) High School students out of school for the summer.
AO3 doesn’t show the same increase in activity in that period, from which I’d argue that a smaller portion of AO3 users are of high school age. Still AO3 also loses momentum through September until the big surge in late December.
I smoothed out all the weekly fluxuations in the above time series, but there are interesting pattern to be found at this shorter time scale. The bar graph below shows the relative rate at which works are posted per day of the week (or rather noonish of one day to noonish of the next). On AO3, Tuesday is are slowest (night) and Sunday our most active. On FFNet, Thursday is the slowest and Saturday to Sunday the most active. That Friday picks up on FFNet but is relatively low on AO3 suggests again an older crowd using the later, who may be out instead of sitting at home writing fan fiction all night.
A last note: I really want to do the same kind of analysis for Wattpad, but their number system makes no sense to me (yet). One day I might crack it, but it would take a lot more work to get comparable data.
