Pointless FanFiction.net Statistics

For some reason I can no longer recall, back in July I wrote a set of scripts to scrape FanFiction.net and acquire some statistics. They’re essentially useless, since the site — despite being the 800lb. gorilla of this space — isn’t the be all and end all of the fanfiction community. Fandoms with archives of their own and fandoms predating the site are definitely under-represented, though I can’t say by exactly how much. Still, what follows is the top thirty FanFiction.net fandoms by number of stories, as of August 20, 2005.

rank name list count estimate type
1 Harry Potter 202996 172600 book
2 Inuyasha 49371 46900 anime
3 Lord of the Rings 37778 35075 book
4 Yu-Gi-Oh 35313 34100 anime
5 Gundam Wing/AC 35003 31750 anime
6 Dragon Ball Z 29629 28475 anime
7 Buffy: The Vampire Slayer 27144 26700 tv
8 Digimon 25845 23775 anime
9 Sailor Moon 20181 19450 anime
10 Yu Yu Hakusho 16534 15675 anime
11 Card Captor Sakura 16117 13600 anime
12 Naruto 15680 14300 anime
13 Star Wars 13001 12750 movie
14 Pokemon 12084 11625 game
15 Rurouni Kenshin 12000 10875 anime
16 Teen Titans 11661 11500 cartoon
17 Beyblade 10934 9250 anime
18 Final Fantasy VII 10562 10400 game
19 Stargate: SG-1 10236 9825 tv
20 Final Fantasy VIII 9737 9525 game
21 X-Men: Evolution 9705 9625 cartoon
22 CSI 8474 8325 tv
23 Wrestling 8163 8100 misc
24 Zelda 7480 7275 game
25 Pirates of the Caribbean 6950 6675 movie
26 Ranma 6884 6350 anime
27 Gilmore Girls 6784 6650 tv
28 X-Men 6649 6625 comic
29 Angel 6461 6375 tv
30 Charmed 6278 6200 tv

The “list count” column contains the site’s reported story counts from the genre listing pages, which includes stories in various languages. The “estimate” column is extrapolated from the pagination on English story listings, and I think it’s correct to ±25.

Surprisingly, anime dominates, with seven of the top ten and 35% of the overall total:

stories by media pie graph

Exclude Harry Potter and The Statistical Anomaly and the results are even more pronounced: books drop from 25% to 9%; anime moves to 41.3%.

stories by media pie graph, excluding Harry Potter

   
This entry was posted on Monday, September 26th, 2005, in the categories “”, “fanfiction” and “fandom”.
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Thus far, 2 responses.

Said Natalie:
May 27th, 2006 at 5:13 pm

hi, i’m doing a project on fanfiction. do you mind if i use your statistics? i’ll credit you. hope to get a reply by tomorrow if possible. that would be greatly appreciated. thank you.

Held Sam:
May 27th, 2006 at 5:17 pm

I don’t think there’s much there you couldn’t get from 5 minutes at fanfiction.net, so of course I don’t mind. :)

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