This post is to clear confusion on FFN about what is popular on FanFiction.Net, what is not, and why. All statements you will see in our report are based on raw point data, collected on 29th June, 2010. This means that everything has been taken in machine fashion directly from the site in the method known as observation, not via sample by omitting fandoms. (It was scooped by looking at the numbers, for the younger readers.)
As such, the presented data has a 100% confidence level. However, we understand the value of server delays and are including an arbitrary 3% error margin because the data is taken from the top-category view, not by trawling inside every fandom. If you recall from the previous post, top-category views show a slightly bigger number of stories (up to 5% for some fandoms) for active fandoms (with over 50 stories), so this is included due to FFN site dynamics as a precaution, despite the inclusion making no difference statistically. This is made necessary further because a part of our target audience has not passed a statistics course.
To make this more interesting, we suggest that everyone takes a guess, which top category is more popular: Anime/Manga, Books, Games, TV shows et cetera, from the list of 10 on the front page.
Depending on your age, the answer is probably 'Games' or 'Books'. The answer would not be far from truth, but not even Harry Potter, the biggest fandom on the site gives Books the top spot. Conversely, it's not the combination of Kingdom Hearts, Pokemon and other games, all with the biggest forums on FFN.
The largest top-level category on FanFiction.Net is Anime/Manga with over 1,062,835 publicly available stories. It also has numerous subcategories/fandoms, 955. Despite this, a third of them (over 300) has under 10 stories, with the bulk concentrated in Naruto 240,635 and Inuyasha 93,196.
If you recall, FFN has approximately 3,200,000 live stories, which means every third story found on FFN is related to Anime/Manga. Why? We can't answer that just yet like we can't tell you why only 1 in 50 writers becomes a Beta Reader.
Anime and Manga have #1. Now, for all Harry Potter, Twilight, LotR, Warriors, PJO et cetera fandoms, you are not unimportant. Books have a firm #2 with 811,044 live stories. Respectively, 461,311 and 150,708 belong to Harry Potter and Twilight. Let's dwell on these two for a moment. The HP fandom is marginally three times as big as Twilight. The underdog may claim this exists because Harry Potter has been a lot longer than Twilight. Making matters fair, that would mean Twilight would be as popular as Harry Potter if they were of the same age.
What's real and what's not? The first HP book has been released in 1997, 13 years from now. The first Twilight book has been released in 2005, 5 years from now. One might exclaim: "Ah hah! Two years is a very small time, so they must be equally popular!" Let's do the math. HP is 2.6 times older than Twilight. Had they been released at the same time, Twilight would now have 391,000 stories, 70,000 behind HP. How big/small of a difference is that? That's almost two LotR fandoms and the total number of new books released in Spain annually.
We return to weights. If the largest fandom in Anime/Manga, Naruto has 240,000 stories, a fourth of the total Anime/Manga, HP has 461,000, way over half of all Book-related fiction accessible on FFN. One may think, seeing that books are #2, more popular than Games, Comics, TV shows (some of which summed up), the world of fiction is into literature fandoms. False. Anime/Manga is popular because there are many fandoms. Books is big because there are many HP. In layman terms, it would be sensible to rename 'Books' into Harry Potter & Twilight, pop reads, which can only scratch the surface of, say, critically acclaimed classical literature. The audience on FFN could have been assumed as an active participant in literature fandoms. It is, however, an active participant in HP and Twilight-level literature fandoms.
Moving on to #3, which is TV shows at 580,596. Curiously, their outlook is similar to that of Anime, with a third of all fandoms having under 10 stories, and there being multiple weight leaders. 15 fandoms take the range from 40k to 10k. In Anime, 20 fandoms have over 10k stories. In Books, 4 fandoms have more than 10,000 stories.
One may want to run an economic monopoly concentration index formula on these numbers. In case it is viable, we present the number of fandoms in the top categories.
Anime/Manga: 1,062,835 stories; 955 fandoms; 20 fandoms have above 10,000 stories
Books: 811,044 stories; 1138 fandoms; 4 fandoms have above 10,000 stories
TV: 580,596 stories; 1013 fandoms; 15 fandoms have above 10,000 stories
Additional research is suggested for the curious: remove all the popular fandoms that add substantial weight to the category (have above 10,000 stories) and make an account of how much dead weight, or impopular fandoms, every top level category has.
At the moment, numbers suggest that the Anime/Manga is the healthiest fandom. Why? 1. It has more stories than others. 2. It has less fandoms. 3. It has more popular fandoms than Books and TV altogether. 4. It is least threatened by C&D (cease and desist) letters.
The fourth one is important. If a cease and desist letter is sent to, say Harry Potter fans, forbidding them to write fan fiction, books would drop dramatically from 811,044 to 349,733. If the same happened to an Anime/Manga fandom, the most loss it would have would be 240,635, less than a quarter of its size. Same applies to TV.
Let's not ignore other fandoms. Below is a limited table/list of top categories without crossovers. Crossovers were counted in our summary of all stories on FFN, but they produce confusing data in the way they are organised, belonging to several fandoms at the same time. The list below is made for clarity purposes.
Name - Story number - Fandom number - Fandoms above 10k - Top fandom
Anime: 1,062,835 - 955 - 20 - Naruto
Books: 811,044 - 1138 - 4 - Harry Potter
TV: 580,596 - 1013 - 15 - Buffy: The Vampire Slayer
Games: 269,261 - 614 - 6 - Kingdom Hearts
Cartoons: 192,918 - 320 - 5 - Teen Titans
Movies: 125,000 - 943 - 4 - Star Wars
Misc: 105,500 - 34 - 2 - Wrestling
Comics: 33,824 - 123 - 0 (8 above 1000) - X-Men
Plays: 15,300 - 85 - 0 (5 above 1000) - RENT
The following information is suggested for further study: how many fandoms are uninhabited (have below 10 stories), how much is that divided by the number of fandoms in the category?
An explanation should follow for the last two categories, Comics and Plays. Plays, for example, have been included much later than other top categories, setting them aside. Also, since they do not exceed 100,000 stories and it is rational to use a proportion size, the active fandom definition is adapted to them as 1000.
As always, present your questions, solicit ideas. This blog is interactive, and we will cover your topics of interest. Coming up next: how many writers does FFN really have?
Wednesday, 7 July 2010
Tuesday, 6 July 2010
FanFiction.Net story totals
Good news!
Our research venture has completed gathering data about site-wide story numbers. This post explains how many stories FanFiction.Net (FFN) really has.
The data in our evaluations has been generated based on the total number of stories posted on June 25th, 2010. The gathered data has been in processing since June 25th, 2010 till June 30th, 2010. We treat it as spatial or point collection; 5 days = 1 instance.
At the time of collection, there has been a total of 6,085,534 registered story entries, based on the newest registered story number in the Just In section on June 25th, 2010.[1].
However, we understand that some stories are deleted, and their ID number is not taken out from the database to be recycled for a new story.[2] Instead, the list carries on, and every newly posted story receives a number higher than the previous.
(An additional explanation for younger readers: you submit a story, and it gets an ID number in FFN's database, so everyone could easily find them. Let's say your ID is 123. If you know that, you can easily make a link without having to copy anything because all stories on FFN have http://www.fanfiction.net/s/*your story ID*. When someone posts a story right after you, their ID is 124, then 125, 126 and so on and so forth. Say, the site got to story number 140, but story 128 has been deemed illegal because it was about living actors, and deleted by the FFN staff, so nobody would sue. What do we have? We have numbers from 1 till 140, but 128 has been deleted. You can't know it has been deleted, by the way, because you're not the writer, and the only way to find out is to check. There are now 139 stories on the site even though it looks like there is 140. Thing is, on a site as big as FFN, you can't just guess how many numbers are 'blank' like that.)
It is the main reason for this analysis: the number FanFiction.Net presents to you is not the total number of stories it has at the moment, but a sum of all fanworks it had at every moment of time available to the public. The key term is 'available to the public' because FFN, according to their ToS, keeps server copies of user submissions. It is reasonable to assume that the real number of stories we can see now (dated June 25th, 2010) is not over 6 million.
We're implementing two methods to reach the data. The first is doing an account of all stories present in all ten top categories and crossovers such as this. Surely, it is a lot of very repetitive and dull labour, but it gives us the exact number, which is: 3,256,278 stories.
As of June 25th, 2010 there are 3,256,278 stories noted as accessible to the public on FanFiction.Net.
This is an accurate number, but it is not 100% of what the story number has been. Why? We made a top category account, without having to rummage through every single fandom, opening it like this. Why is this important? The number of stories in the top category window is always bigger (or even, when the fandom is inactive [has less than 50 stories]) than the real number of fictions one can browse inside the category. The researchers cannot provide you a firm answer on this discrepancy, but it may be attributed to dynamics of stories being deleted at a slower rate than they are added (for example, if you upload a story by mistake, and delete it, you raise the top category number of stories, and it stays above the real number even though you can no longer find the story, a server delay).
It has been determined that, depending on the fandom, the real number is from 0,19% to 5% smaller than the one provided. In large categories, the weight of which forces the researchers to consider them, this number teeters closer to the first value. Now, it might not seem substantial, but Twilight with its 150,000 uploads may have up to 2000 dead stories counted as alive every day. To be completely fair to the estimate, we are multiplying the number by an arbitrary 0.987 coefficient, which best describes the current number of stories, as seen in ten most popular, story-wise, subcategories of Books, Anime and others, except crossovers. Since they make up the trending bulk of FFN, their averages have been considered.
Here is a better estimate, statistically not different than the first, but more exact for the human eye: 3,213,946.
What does that say to you? FanFiction.Net is only 54%-53% (without/with 0.987 coefficient) of what it appears to the layman, with the remaining 46%-47% being deleted content. As such, you may take it that every second story is destined to be deleted, and out of every two stories You post only one will survive (statistically).
What about the second method? Aside from these real numbers taken in raw, the research includes a sample of 1100 randomly generated story IDs with a range [1;6085534], which allows the research to continue with case study at a 3% error margin and a 95,34% confidence level. The survivability estimate taken from the sample size is 55%, which is within the 3% acceptable error and statistically identical to 54%-53%, received with the help of raw data. For future studies, this means our method of sampling follows the general population's characteristics.
In conclusion, there are 3,213,946 stories on FanFiction.Net at the time of our study, and nearly half of all stories posted will sooner or later disappear. How soon? Come back later to find out!
Should you require additional data, requests can be made in the comments, emailed to Lord Kelvin or posted in the Literate Union forum. The list used in our sample can be found here:
http://www.usbupload.com/23228_FFNstatsdatadoc.usb
http://www.usbupload.com/23227_samplelinksFFNdoc.usb
Our research venture has completed gathering data about site-wide story numbers. This post explains how many stories FanFiction.Net (FFN) really has.
The data in our evaluations has been generated based on the total number of stories posted on June 25th, 2010. The gathered data has been in processing since June 25th, 2010 till June 30th, 2010. We treat it as spatial or point collection; 5 days = 1 instance.
At the time of collection, there has been a total of 6,085,534 registered story entries, based on the newest registered story number in the Just In section on June 25th, 2010.[1].
However, we understand that some stories are deleted, and their ID number is not taken out from the database to be recycled for a new story.[2] Instead, the list carries on, and every newly posted story receives a number higher than the previous.
(An additional explanation for younger readers: you submit a story, and it gets an ID number in FFN's database, so everyone could easily find them. Let's say your ID is 123. If you know that, you can easily make a link without having to copy anything because all stories on FFN have http://www.fanfiction.net/s/*your story ID*. When someone posts a story right after you, their ID is 124, then 125, 126 and so on and so forth. Say, the site got to story number 140, but story 128 has been deemed illegal because it was about living actors, and deleted by the FFN staff, so nobody would sue. What do we have? We have numbers from 1 till 140, but 128 has been deleted. You can't know it has been deleted, by the way, because you're not the writer, and the only way to find out is to check. There are now 139 stories on the site even though it looks like there is 140. Thing is, on a site as big as FFN, you can't just guess how many numbers are 'blank' like that.)
It is the main reason for this analysis: the number FanFiction.Net presents to you is not the total number of stories it has at the moment, but a sum of all fanworks it had at every moment of time available to the public. The key term is 'available to the public' because FFN, according to their ToS, keeps server copies of user submissions. It is reasonable to assume that the real number of stories we can see now (dated June 25th, 2010) is not over 6 million.
We're implementing two methods to reach the data. The first is doing an account of all stories present in all ten top categories and crossovers such as this. Surely, it is a lot of very repetitive and dull labour, but it gives us the exact number, which is: 3,256,278 stories.
As of June 25th, 2010 there are 3,256,278 stories noted as accessible to the public on FanFiction.Net.
This is an accurate number, but it is not 100% of what the story number has been. Why? We made a top category account, without having to rummage through every single fandom, opening it like this. Why is this important? The number of stories in the top category window is always bigger (or even, when the fandom is inactive [has less than 50 stories]) than the real number of fictions one can browse inside the category. The researchers cannot provide you a firm answer on this discrepancy, but it may be attributed to dynamics of stories being deleted at a slower rate than they are added (for example, if you upload a story by mistake, and delete it, you raise the top category number of stories, and it stays above the real number even though you can no longer find the story, a server delay).
It has been determined that, depending on the fandom, the real number is from 0,19% to 5% smaller than the one provided. In large categories, the weight of which forces the researchers to consider them, this number teeters closer to the first value. Now, it might not seem substantial, but Twilight with its 150,000 uploads may have up to 2000 dead stories counted as alive every day. To be completely fair to the estimate, we are multiplying the number by an arbitrary 0.987 coefficient, which best describes the current number of stories, as seen in ten most popular, story-wise, subcategories of Books, Anime and others, except crossovers. Since they make up the trending bulk of FFN, their averages have been considered.
Here is a better estimate, statistically not different than the first, but more exact for the human eye: 3,213,946.
What does that say to you? FanFiction.Net is only 54%-53% (without/with 0.987 coefficient) of what it appears to the layman, with the remaining 46%-47% being deleted content. As such, you may take it that every second story is destined to be deleted, and out of every two stories You post only one will survive (statistically).
What about the second method? Aside from these real numbers taken in raw, the research includes a sample of 1100 randomly generated story IDs with a range [1;6085534], which allows the research to continue with case study at a 3% error margin and a 95,34% confidence level. The survivability estimate taken from the sample size is 55%, which is within the 3% acceptable error and statistically identical to 54%-53%, received with the help of raw data. For future studies, this means our method of sampling follows the general population's characteristics.
In conclusion, there are 3,213,946 stories on FanFiction.Net at the time of our study, and nearly half of all stories posted will sooner or later disappear. How soon? Come back later to find out!
Should you require additional data, requests can be made in the comments, emailed to Lord Kelvin or posted in the Literate Union forum. The list used in our sample can be found here:
http://www.usbupload.com/23228_FFNstatsdatadoc.usb
http://www.usbupload.com/23227_samplelinksFFNdoc.usb
Tuesday, 29 June 2010
Welcome!
This blog has been created to store all the data Lord Kelvin and other curious people banded under the FFN Research flag have or are collecting about FanFiction.Net. Expect analysis, various facts and queries in every informative post.
Finding hard data related to fandom and fan fiction has been...difficult as of late. Anything available online was either inaccurate, obsolete or cost $600 for a peek. This was unacceptable, so we took matters into our own hands. Our purpose is to become a reputable basis for every worthwhile query. By fans. For fans. We all hope our efforts and studies are going to inspire you, dear readers, to join this cause.
If you have any requests, post them in comments below. Alternatively, you may send feedback and ideas to Lord Kelvin.
Finding hard data related to fandom and fan fiction has been...difficult as of late. Anything available online was either inaccurate, obsolete or cost $600 for a peek. This was unacceptable, so we took matters into our own hands. Our purpose is to become a reputable basis for every worthwhile query. By fans. For fans. We all hope our efforts and studies are going to inspire you, dear readers, to join this cause.
If you have any requests, post them in comments below. Alternatively, you may send feedback and ideas to Lord Kelvin.
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