Destination: Toast!

Because I was curious about the breakdown of fanfic on AO3.  And because I like charts.

Note: the relationship categories and the warnings are not mutually exclusive, which means those charts may be a bit misleading. [Since making the original post, I’ve realized this fact and realized I shouldn’t have used pie charts in some of these cases; mea culpa.] For example, works that are labeled both M/M and Gen will be counted in both the M/M and the Gen slices of the pie.  Due to this double-counting, the total number of works in these charts is greater than the total number of works on AO3.  I addressed this problem later in the series: Warnings, Relationships.

Also note: the Completion Rates graph is somewhat misleading, and I looked into this more later, as well; more like 80% of fics are completed in the long run.

Update: Since this has gone a bit viral, I thought I’d explain my methods in more detail.  (It was pretty simple, and you can easily do the same kind of analysis for your own fandom, if you’re interested.)  I’ve also done a lot of follow up analyses since making this post that you might want to check out. 

Getting the numbers: I used the AO3 Works Search page, entered a given search, and then counted the number of fics returned.  Example searches:

• search for Gen works – check “Gen” box; hit search
• search for works with over a million words – type “>1000000” into “Word count” box; hit search
• search for total number of fics (needed to determine the number of incomplete or multi-chapter fics) – don’t type anything; hit search.
  
  Note: Sometimes an empty search, or any other search that yields too many results, just returns an error message.  When this happens, I do the same search, but split it up into chunks and then add them together, e.g.:
  
  Total num fics = (word count < 1000) + (word count is 1000-5000) + (word count is > 5000)
  
  But, as an approximation, in May 2013, there were about 720,000 works on AO3.

Making the charts: You can use any spreadsheet for this, but I used Google Docs for all my AO3 analyses.  For all of these analyses, I had one column of labels and one column with the corresponding number of works.  E.g.:

Teen and up audiences 214771

General audiences 203587

Explicit 125364

Mature 110418

Not rated 38473

I just highlighted both columns and chose “Insert chart”, then selected a pie chart from the list of options.  I fiddled with some of the advanced settings, but for the most part, Google Docs has decent defaults.  (I’ve also used GDocs to make bar charts and other figures for other posts in this series.)

The only slightly more advanced charts were the following:

• For “Number of chapters”, there’s no way to search for multi-chapter works; I searched for single-chapter works only and then subtracted that from total number of works.
• For the completion chart, I was only interested in multi-chapter fics, since single-chapter works are inherently completed.  So, first I found the total number of single and multi-chapter works (as above).  Then (number of complete works) - (number of single-chapter works) = (number of complete & multi-chapter works).  And subtract that from the total number of multi-chapter works to get the incomplete multi-chapter works.  

The details:  Here are all the numbers that are missing from some of the above charts (where the pie slices are too small to get labels) – but please remember the above caveats about Categories/Warnings:

Categories:
M/M: 45.46%
Gen: 24.34%
F/M: 20.15%
F/F: 4.62%
Multi: 3.77%
Other: 1.66%

Ratings:
General audiences: 29.39%  
Teen and up audiences: 31.01%  
Mature: 15.94%
Explicit: 18.10%
Not rated 5.55%

Warnings:
No Archive Warnings Apply: 57.14%  
Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings: 30.62%  
Major Character Death: 3.99%
Graphic Depictions Of Violence: 3.95%
Underage: 2.41%
Rape/Non-Con: 1.90%

Word count:
0-101: 4.45% 
101-500: 14.24%
501-1000: 17.15%
1001-5000: 45.42%
5001-10000: 9.02%
10001-50000: 8.37%
> 50001: 1.34%

[MORE FANDOM STATS]