I don’t think @fanfictionrecommendations-comis right about fanfic dying. It’s doing fine. But they link to some interesting stats, that I want to blather on about examine in more depth.
If you are anything like most fanfiction readers, you spent a large portion of 2010 on Fanfiction.net, browsing, reading your favorite fics, writing or dreaming of writing. And like most people, you never noticed that with each passing year the world of fanfiction was shrinking.
Well, I, personally was not spending any time at Fanfiction.net in 2010, and neither were most of my fan friends. I was more or less on hiatus from fandom then, but even if I weren’t, FF.net wasn’t where I’d be looking for fanfic. I abandoned that site when they banned NC-17 stories in 2002. I have an account there, with what stories of mine remained after they deleted the adult ones, but haven’t been back since the 2002 purge. I am not planning to ever return. The interface is clunky, the stories don’t display correctly in my version of Firefox, and it’s just not terribly inviting, even without the limitations on content.
12% of all accounts on [Fanfiction.net] have at least one published story and are actively engaged in fandom activity. 88% of members on Fanfiction.net are currently not shaping any fandom.
This doesn’t surprise me. It’s pretty typical of online forums in general. Heck, of life in general. Far more people read stuff than write it.
Even if you have written a story, it is most probable that you will not be on [Fanfiction.net] longer than six months .
That’s interesting, but hardly shocking. Online communities of all sorts tend to have a high churn rate. Easy in, easy out. FF.net’s might be higher than most, because of their demographics, and leaving FF.net doesn’t mean they’re leaving fandom.
There were more fandoms being idle [on Fanfiction.net] in every category than becoming active in 2010.
This does not surprise me, either. It’s the nature of fandom, and was even in the days of fanzines. Fans tend to move from fandom to fandom, and old fandoms tend to die off if there’s nothing to feed them. And FanFiction.net has been around since 1998. That’s a lot of time for abandoned fandoms to accumulate. Not to mention all the “orphan fandoms” that were never popular to begin with.
The happier thought comes quick: maybe our beloved fanficcers have just found other places to write, places where we have to follow? Archive of Our Own prompted a mass migration, of course. But Archive still doesn’t have half the population Fanfiction.net did - and it has its fair share of dead accounts too.
I think they are too quick to dismiss the exodus to AO3. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that FF.net’s decline began when AO3 took off. AO3 might not have the population FF.net has, but FF.net has several years’ head start, and they are getting more traffic than FF.net is now, according to Alexa.
The Toasty Stats post linked to has some interesting graphs. Nothing unexpected, but it’s nice to see it laid out graphically. The canon matters. Without new material, fanfic will decline. Not necessarily to zero, but it will decline. This is the fate of all fandoms eventually.
Toasty Stats agrees that AO3 is the reason FF.net is declining:
After a long period of growth – fic creation roughly doubled from 2006 to 2012 – FFN seems at last to be in decline. By all appearances, the site peaked in 2012 and has slowly been fading ever since. Even with new features like pairing labels, people are posting fewer stories every year. True, 2014 still averaged over 2,600 new fics a day (and about as many new users!), including fics since deleted, but that’s down from over 3,100 a day in 2012. It’s got a lot of life in it still, but barring major changes, it looks like its busiest days are over.
Why? The growing popularity of AO3 surely has something to do with it. FanFiction.Net users have long been frustrated with the site’s lack of features and moderation policy, not to mention the “War on Punctuation”, all issues AO3 was designed to address. The sudden removal of thousands of M-rated fics late in May 2012, what one commentator called “The Book Burning That Wasn’t”, may simply have been the last straw, and there does seem to have been a mass migration to AO3 at the time. Could be other causes, too – goodness knows the people in charge at FFN have never been the most receptive to user concerns.
Whatever the reason, FanFiction.Net activity as a whole is declining.
The only thing that surprises me is that it took so long. “Adult” works in fandom have been a bone of contention since the beginning, and IME, smut always wins. Seems to be what fans want. I know I always get more hits on my explicit stories than on my gen stories.
This graph might be skewed by teens being more willing to give their ages, but if it’s anything close to accurate…FF.net is basically a teen site, with an average age of 15. (And a lot of kids too young to be there, lying about their ages.) If that’s true, it’s no surprise that many of them don’t stick around long. They grow up and get other interests…or maintain the same interests, at more adult-oriented sites. I don’t see any reason to panic in these numbers.
(It might also explain why FF.net has made the decisions they’ve made with respect to adult content. Though I guess it’s hard to untangle cause and effect.)
I can understand why some want to raise the profile of fanfic. But I’m not sure it’s a good idea. There’s a reason for the “tabooness” of fanfic. It exists because the copyright holders allow it to exist. That could change, if it becomes too prominent. And fanfic is doing fine, even if you can’t win a Hugo for writing it.
