Hitwise, a company that tracks trends and things based on what people search for on the Internet,
just posted a graph about Fanfiction.net. That one site accounts for 30% of all traffic in the fanfiction category.
The part that amused me the most is that the nerdy middle-aged guy who writes the blog says that he had never heard of this category of user-generated content before. And, in fact, 10 of 10 people he asked had also never heard of it.
In denial? It's hard to say.