Hey!  :)  I don’t have time for a deep dive now, but can I recommend fandomstats.org, where you can get a quick sense of the AO3 fandom? (Use the official AO3 tag: Haikyuu!!)

For instance, a few things that jump out at me – Haikyuu has few crossovers.  

For comparison: 1.3% of Sherlock works are also tagged Harry Potter; 1.5% of Naruto works are also tagged Harry Potter; 1% of Game of Thrones works are also tagged Harry Potter… I guess what I’m saying is, I’m a little surprised to see that only 0.2% of Haikyuu works are also tagged Harry Potter, and only 0.6% with the most common crossover, Kuroko no Basuke.  But it’s not completely crazy, either; there are plenty of relatively self-contained universes in fandom, like Star Trek and Star Wars.  (And, for that matter, only 0.7% of  Supernatural works are also tagged Sherlock, which is its most common crossover.)

This fandom is dominated by M/M, but not by any single relationship:

It is also very fluffy! :)

Hope that helps a bit.  Feel free to dig in deeper on fandomstats.org and try combinations like “Haikyuu!!, Alternate Universe” – which can reveal some of the most popular AUs in the Freeform Tags section (Soulmates, College/University, Fantasy, Coffee Shops, Canon Divergence):

Hi!  (And sorry if you asked this ages ago – I’ve been incredibly busy the past couple months and am just now seeing some of my asks, oops.) 

Short answer – AO3 has been getting a ton of usage lately!  To the point where I haven’t wanted to run any of my automated scripts to scrape data, because I don’t want to further tax their servers.  But AO3 shared some stats.  They have some cool graphs and info about how things like the China AO3 ban factor in – I encourage clicking through and reading the whole thing.  

I’ve also revisualized a few of the stats in a different way, to highlight how things changed January-April (their post was made in April, so I don’t have more recent data).  Basically, the rate of posting new works (especially new chapters) is going up, and so is the rate of page views and engagement with works.  (This doesn’t capture seasonal patterns, though.)

Edit: oops, my last graph got left off! this shows differences over the years (there’s also a more granular graph in the original post) – notice that things have been increasing every year, but there’s a bigger jump from 2019 to 2020 and from January to April than the general trend predicts:

Our latest is live! 📊 And it's by none other than our most frequent podcast guest, @destinationtoast aka @toastystats!!!

Toast gets meta on their stats works, writing about how they got into fandom data analysis and the way their practice has evolved over the years. TOAST ORIGIN STORY:

The BBC’s modern adaptation of the Holmes mysteries compelled me to think, “Surely someone out there must have written fanfic about Sherlock Holmes and John Watson having sex.” I googled it and was led to AO3, where, in fact, many, many people were writing about that very thing. 

This piece has many, many graphs and charts, including comparisons of the original stats Toast crunched back in 2013 alongside the results of those same questions today.

Click through to read or listen to Toast reading an audio version! 🍞

So excited to get this one out in the world! 💞 @destinationtoast has been such a fantastic collaborator over the years. I was really pleased we got the ORIGIN STORY here alongside pretty fascinating comparisons between 2013 AO3 and 2026 AO3. (Plus super interesting thoughts about fandom stats as fanworks!)

Woohoo!! I was delighted to write this piece about my journey with fandom data, and to share a bunch of retrospective data (2013 vs 2026)! Also to read my article aloud very cheerfully, I've been informed. XD

I have been given a ✨🎁 gift link 🎁✨ to share with y'all -- read the article free for one week! But also support to Fansplaining if you can, because they do great fandom journalism (like publishing me obvs 💅), and it's a bad economy for such things right now.

once-a-polecat asked:

Do you have any broad numbers on the increase in Chinese language docs over time and across fandoms in recent years? Given the story around China blocking AO3, I’ve been seeing a lot of speculation that it’s because it narrow fandoms. That’s not consistent with what I’ve seen over the last few years, but I was wondering if you have hard numbers before I duplicate any work.

Hey!  Here are all the current Anime & Manga fandoms with at least 10K fanworks:

That top one is Boku no Hero Academia, btw.  If you can’t read the tiny print/want the complete names, click here.  That link also contains a list of all Anime & Manga fandoms with 500+ works – there are 191 such fandoms currently!  (Though some of those are subtags/overlap with others.)

Unfortunately, I don’t have an easy way to separate out the manga-only titles from this list (ones that don’t have any anime).  But you may be interested in a 2017 analysis I did of popular cartoons & anime.  It looks like things have changed a great deal in three years – Boku No Hero Academia has grown by more than 15x and shot up the charts to #1!  I was so surprised by the changes that I decided to redo the above visualization, but split up each fandom into works before Oct 2017 and works since then:

All the fandoms have grown since then, but some have REALLY grown! :D  JoJo no Kimyou na Bouken has the next biggest increase after BNHA.

Again, you don’t have to squint at this if you don’t wanna – the raw data is available!