Harry Potter Fandom on AO3, Example Analysis

[fffinnagain]

Do we want to use this space to share specific analyses and techniques? To give it a go, here is something I pulled together this week end in answer to a comment by snowgall. I scrapped metadata of all public works under the “Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling” fandom on AO3, to see if there was anything interesting in the number of works and creators posting in

Comments

[fffinnagain]

The distinction between activity on AO3 and activity in a Fandom as a whole is very important. And I don't doubt that the growing popularity of AO3 does entice more fans to choose it as a platform for sharing works, however, I am inclined to interpret the growth rate here as suggests that people are continuing to join the fandom, as creators, specifically because of the concentration of short term posters. Like I've seen in the Sherlock fandom, most creators in any short time space are pretty casual, only posting one work. These are mostly fans who get a fresh itch to make a thing and then move on. Only a minority of creators continue to post works for months and years, and I'd expect most of the fans who migrate to AO3 from other platforms are in this category. So the sharp drop in contributors beyond their initial wave is inline with the interpretation that fan creators are still joining the Harry Potter fandom.

As to comparing Harry Potter and Sherlock, it's easier to see what's going on when they are aligned on the same time scale. So here is a plot of the number of works and creators in each (aligned to different vertical axes) just for the last couple of years (so since series 2 in Sherlock).



The trend lines on the number of contributors per month shows a small difference, with Sherlock being a steeper (so growing faster). Of course, Sherlock's series 3 arrived in the middle of this (January 2014), which stimulated a lot of creators, so I'd be kind of worried if it didn't outpace the growth of Harry Potter, at least a bit.