HP fandom stats

[emmagrant01]

partly_bouncy has posted an interesting analysis of trends in the HP fandom here. There's a lot of interesting stuff there, and she's come to some very intriguing conclusions.

For example, she estimates that the slash community is larger than the het community, which is really interesting to me. She also looks at how fandom activity correlates with the release of the books and films. She shows evidence that Harry/Hermione activity peaks after the release of a new film, while Harry/Draco activity seems more related to the release of the books. Heh.

One thing I'm not sure about (and I commented so on the post) is her estimate of the total number of HP fanfics: about 300,000. That seems really low to me, for some reason. She doesn't seem to have accounted for fics posted on LJ, though I'm not sure how one might go about doing that.

Comments

[daisy-chan.livejournal.com]

300,000 if definately too low. There's almost that much on ff.net alone, and I'd like to think the HP fandom has better representation than that. ;p

The number would also vary as to what "qualifies" as a fic to the person doing the counting. 100 word drabbles? remixes? unbetaed? crack or badfic? podfic?

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

I know. Actually, I'm not sure she looked at ffn. Hmmm...

But yeah, good question. If drabbles count as one fic, what about chaptered fics with 50 parts?

[daisy-chan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I looked earlier and I think it had something like 280,000 in the HP section.
There's also a problem of most people crossposting, either to various archives or multiple LJ communities. There's no way to really be certain of how much is out there without guessing with a huge margin of error.

And if each drabble counts as one, what about 1sentence? Is each sentence one? or each set?
And would crossovers only count as half? ;p

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

Wow, 1sentence? I've never heard of that before!

[daisy-chan.livejournal.com]

You should try it!

[nikao725.livejournal.com]

seems like that would be the amount on like one site, not the whole fandom.

i'd say something closer to 1,000,000 with all of the different sites and just one-shots and stuff that are out there. possibly even more.

<3

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

I know -- at least 1,000,000, I'd say.

[twigged.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about the # of fics in fandom recently and I'd guess closer to a million. Aren't there several hundred thousand on ff.net alone? And many older/more experienced fen don't post there even as a secondary archive.

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure why she lowballed it so much, but it looks like she didn't look at a lot of archives. There are SO many of them.

[thalia]

Don't even get me started on partly_bouncy's shoddy use of statistics. I know she's a grad student, and she's supposed to understand how to do research, but it always looks to me like she's pulling stuff out her arse.

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

She sure didn't go into much detail on her methodology. I assumed it was just something she did on a lark on Excel, and wasn't that serious about. Maybe not. :-P

[thalia]

She's posted all sorts of stuff about fannish history to FCA-L, and she usually gets shot down pretty quickly by people who were involved with whatever she's talking about. From what I remember, she tends to take the attitude that inaccurate information is better than no information at all, and I completely disagree with that.

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

I had no idea about her history -- interesting. And yeah, I disagree with that too. Hmmm...