Bounce! (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} partly_bouncy) wrote in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} fanthropology,@ 2007-01-06 16:33:00 |
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The Harry Potter Fandom: By The Numbers
Introduction
This is an attempt to look at existing and historical relationships in the Harry Potter fan fiction community using numerical data. (And hey, if anyone would like to help me make this publishable, I'd be much obliged. My e-mail is partly_bouncy@livejournal.com.) This post is also image intensive.
Most of this information was culled from
FanHistory.Com on January 5 and January 6, 2007. The mailing list data is accurate as of December 20, 2006 and various charts from external sites give timeline references as to when that information was gathered. Because of the sheer size of the Harry Potter fan fiction community, it is not possible to include every community, every mailing list, every fan fiction archive in this sample. The data thus has some shortcomings. These issues will be addressed as they appear in the meta analysis.
Raw Data
Most of the raw data used in this analysis can be found on my user sandbox at FanHistory.Com. If anyone desires it, please feel free to contact me and I'll send you the link for the excel table.
Fandom Size
How big is the Harry Potter fandom? It is hard to even begin to grasp that. A small sample of some 10 archives in December 2006 put the total Harry Potter stories at 321,454. On January 6, 2007, 380 communities and 475 users on LiveJournal list Harry Potter as an interest. As of January 6, 2007, there are are 4,268 mailing lists that in some form or other touch on Harry Potter. "Harry Potter" fan fiction as a Google search brought up 1,510,000 results on Google on January 6, 2007. The Dramonine LiveJournal community, a ship specific community, has 1,536 members as of January 2, 2007. In one of the busiest months in the Harry Potter fan fiction communities, over 18,331 messages were posted to various mailing lists. The size is mind boggling. And this from a community that really did not spring into existence until 1999.
Correlations
In earlier meta posted tofanthropology, I had looked at the relationship between canon release and fan activity. In both the Supernatural analysis and a more broad analysis, there was almost no correlation, suggesting that fan activity was random, not directly related, not timed to the release of canon.
For this analysis, canon was defined as book releases, movie releases and DVD releases. The release of canon was primarily concerned with the United States and the United Kingdom. The dates used can be found here. In addition to those dates, some international dates have been included to help reflect the international component of the Harry Potter fan fiction community. The international dates are also reflected on the table.
Using the data collected, the following correlations were computed:
Canon Release/Mailing Lists 0.257949088
Canon Release/Archives Founded 0.262431517
Canon Release/LiveJournal Communities 0.231879623
Canon Release/Cease and Desist Letters 0.146805055
Mailing Lists/Archive Founded 0.223355112
Mailing Lists/LiveJournal Communities 0.584535484
Mailing Lists/Cease and Desist Letters 0.409257429
Archive Founded/LiveJournal Communities 0.232095392
Archive Founded/Cease and Desist Letters -0.40824829
LiveJournal Communities/Cease and Desist Letters 0.636043102
Most of these correlations suggest little relationship exists between the two variables. The release of canon does have a meaningful correlation with fannish activities.
There is a some what meaningful correlation between cease and desist letters sent in the Harry Potter fandom and the creation of LiveJournal communities by that fandom. This relationship is some what confusing. It may suggest a fan response to threats from TPTB by retreating to LiveJournal where they feel less legally threatened. It may also help explain the negative and somewhat much less meaningful correlation between Harry Potter fan fiction archive founding and cease and desist letters being sent, suggesting that fans were hesitant to create archives when they thought they might be in legal trouble if they did that. Or the two could have a somewhat meaningful correlation because of random chance, that there is no logical reason for them to correlate.
The other some what meaningful correlation is between mailing list volume and LiveJournal community creation. This make some sense as it suggests that fans are active at the same time across different on-line mediums.
When correlations are based on yearly totals, rather than monthly, the picture changes quite dramatically and more more meaningful correlations appear.
LiveJournal/Canon by Year 0.541134272
Canon by Year/Archive Founding 0.620924457
LiveJournal by Year/Archive Founding 0.551220007
LiveJournal by Year/Cease and Desist 0.439698206
Canon by Year/Cease and Desist 0.274509804
Archive founding by Year/Cease and Desist 0.130855981
If LiveJournal community creation is correlated with canon release on a yearly basis, rather than monthly, the correlation is 0.541134272. This is a much stronger correlation than when looked at monthly. To give a vague visual idea of what a this looks like, see the chart below.
Canon release and fan fiction archive creation also show a much more meaningful correlation when looked at by year.
This can be viewed visually as:
Influential Stories
The Harry Potter fan fiction community has a number of influential stories. A sample of 19 stories listed as influential Harry Potter stories on FanHistory.Com was taken. The list includes the following (labeled by ship):
Draco/Hermione Basketcase by Attica
Draco/Hermione We'll Always Have Paris by Melissa D
Draco/Hermione Once Upon A Thyme by zensho
Draco/Hermione No Longer Helpless by DB2020
Draco/Hermione Future Parents Program by Avari20
Draco/Hermione The God of the Lost by Gravidy
Snape/Hermione Pawn to Queen by Riley
Snape/Hermione Letter from Exile One Merciful Morning
Snape/Hermione Beyond the Silver Rainbow by Lupinlover
Snape/Harry Midnight Confessions by Majolique
Snape/Harry A Different Lesson by Unquiet
Snape/Harry Two Loveable Young Women by Kangeiko
Snape/Harry Tea series by Telanau
Snape/Harry Too Wise to Woo Peaceably by JayKay
Snape/Harry Marching off to War by Sushi
Draco/Ginny Why I'm Glad Ginny Is Dating Draco Malfoy by Sarea Okelani
Draco/Ginny Dragon Kisses by Davesmom
Draco/Ginny The Doppelganger Dilemma by Mynuet
Draco/Ginny Polyjuice Potion by Davesmom
Draco/Ginny Life Canvas, by Jade Okelani
A one was given to the story for each year that the story was written. 2001 was, based on this sample, the peak year for influential stories being written in the Harry Potter fandom. This was one year before the peak release of Harry Potter canon, which happened in 2002. Also of note, there is a 0.822803195 correlation between the yearly volume of canon release and yearly total of publication of influential Harry Potter stories. This is a significant number, especially when compared to other correlations looked at so far.
In chart form this looks like:
It shows that Snape/Hermione peaked in 2001, Draco/Hermione peaked in 2005, Snape/Harry peaked in 2001 and Draco/Ginny never really peaked but plateaued across several years.
One of the problems with this examining this particular category is that the sample size is rather small. It needs a larger sample to make better cross pairing category conclusions. The reason for lack of a larger sample sizes is that not many pairing pages on FanHistory.Com. In the cases of some stories, they were linked to external archives which did not list the upload dates of the story.
Mailing Lists
The following chart was made in regards to a comment on my 2006 year in review post. It looks at posting volume for mailing lists in 2006 which had more than 24 posts in March 2006.
It demonstrates quite nicely one of the issues with some Harry Potter mailing lists: Lack of consistent posting volume over time. Hermione_FanFictionHP has huge volume for two months and then basically drops off the face of the earth. This is true for other mailing lists, especially earlier in the fandom's history. Some mailing lists had huge volume for a few months in 2001 but when LiveJournal became more influential in fandom, their posting volume dropped to the point where most were lucky to have two posts a month. HPforGrownups is a mailing list for the discussion of Harry Potter canon. While the group has been subject to some fighting, details of which can be found on FanHistory.Com, it has stayed some what true to that, even if those canon interpretations swing in favor of certain ships. Despite a lack of serious canon, the list's volume never dropped below 1,200 posts for a month for the year.
Of the nine lists shown in that chart, three are slash based, two are het based, two are founded for the discussion of stories, one is character centered and one is for canon discussion. This demonstrates that various factions in the Harry Potter fan fiction community are active and none have really dropped off the face of the earth in the medium of mailing lists.
Ships
It is at this time that some of the cold hard data that I collected is abandoned in order to look at trend graphs generated by services like Google, IceRocket, Technorati and Blog Pulse at it pertains to Harry Potter pairings. Most of this data is much harder to quantify as they do not offer solid numbers and unlike my stats, it is not always clear what they are counting.
The following is a chart comparing the references to Harry Potter slash to Harry Potter fanfic generated by BlogPulse. Fanfic was the word chosen because it resulted in greater hits than "fan fiction" offered which seemed to demonstrate a word choice preference amongst Harry Potter fans.
It is noteworthy that Harry Potter slash almost always has a greater percentage of posts in the six month period looked at. It is unclear exactly, to this author, why there are substantial dips in posts around early October and November 18. This chart may also help demonstrate that the slash component of the Harry Potter fan fiction community is actually bigger than the het component, despite the attention that the het community gets for its various pairing wars and appearances on Fandom Wank.
The following chart was created in August 2006. It shows the references on Technorati from August 2005 to August 2006.
There is a distinct trough in October 2005. It doesn't seem to pick up in November 2005. October was the release of one of the books in China in Chinese and in the native language in Taiwan. November 2005 was when one of the Harry Potter movies was released in theaters for most countries in the world. It would seem to suggest that the release of movies is not a driving force in the Harry/Draco community and that slashy vibes are more from the books than the movies.
Compare that with a similar chart from Technorati on the same date, only looking at the Harry/Hermione pairing:
The Harry/Hermione,like the Harry/Draco community, had a trough in October 2006. The pairing appears to have seen a major bump from the movie. This may have been fueled, in part, because there are components of the Harry/Hermione fandom who are vocal supporters of the real person fic pairing of Dan/Emma which could help tie the pairing into the movie, along with the book.
This again should be contrasted with the Ron/Hermione pairing during the same period:
This community has a trough but a much smaller on in October. The volume picked up again big time around the time of the movie before leveling back off again. It has another large peak around the time that the Charlotte Lennox story was being told. This may or may not be a coincidence. Some of the December 2005 peaking also coincides with Sugar Quill's birthday.
These three communities can be compared side by in the last six months of 2006:
On this chart, the various pairings all generally seem to mirror each other, going up and down at the same time. It almost suggests that interest in the fandom waxes and wanes during the same periods, that interest is similar, regardless of pairings.
There are a couple of big peaks in this chart, with all three pairings peaking at the same time. This includes a peak in early August 2006. This peak is only for Harry/Draco and Ron/Hermione. The Harry/Hermione pairing peaked a few days earlier. There is another peak in mid-September. The Harry/Hermione jump in interest is again much lower when compared to the other pairings. Interest in all three pairings seems to almost totally drop off around November 18. All of these peaks and low points happen with minimal canon influence. Nothing significant canon wise was released in this period.
Snape is one of the characters which draws a lot of attention and pairings based on him are different than Harry/Draco in where their historical roots are. Snape fandom largely comes from media fandom. (Harry/Hermione, Harry/Draco draws largely from first time members of fandom. Ron/Hermione and Harry/Ginny have feet in both but are more canon centered than most of the media fandom based Snape pairings. It is best explained by this venn diagram right here!) The following is a chart similar to the other one but looking at the Snape pairings of Snape/Hermione, Snape/Harry and Snape/Ron.
In early December 2006, the Snape/Hermione pairing peaks and peaks big time. It leaves the other pairings looking puny in comparison. This despite the Snape/Harry pairing being the one mentioned more for most of the time period on that graph. I cannot even begin to explain why.
In rounding up the pairings and segue into the next section on Big Name Fans, the following chart is one of the few that could be obtained from Google Trends.
The above chart compares the Google Trends for the following key phrases: cassandra claire, fiction alley, harry potter slash, harry potter fan fiction. The start of this chart is 2004.
No pairings ever offered enough trend data for Google to give a chart but it did give one for Cassandra Claire. The drop off in interest in Cassandra Claire on that chart is around the time that her Very Secret Diaries officially came to an end. The renewed interest in mid 2005 was during the same period that a new Harry Potter book was released which seems to signal, based on this chart, a general uptic in interest for all Harry Potter fan fiction. It also helps explain why Fiction Alley appears for the only time in that two year period. The increased interest in Cassandra Claire in mid 2006 coincides with the Charlotte Lennox story being told and the larger 2006 interest coincides with the airing of Cassandra Claire's plagiarism. Despite the interest in that part of the Harry Potter fandom, it did not appear to create any interest in knowing more about the rest of the Harry Potter fandom.
The 2004 peak for harry potter fan fiction and harry potter slash happened around the same time that a movie was released in theaters. While other variables examined by numbers earlier do not correlate with canon release, this chart appears to show a strong correlation. It also explains the up tick in interest in November 2005 when another movie was released. What is most interesting though is that the books appear, based on this chart, to create a greater interest then the movies. Slash mirrors the interest in fan fiction. It shares the same ups and down and is always lower. This suggests that hetfic and gen are larger in the Harry Potter fandom than the slash contingent.
Big Name Fans
The Harry Potter fan fiction community is one of Big Name Fans. While the importance of this type of individual seems to be on the wane as the Harry Potter fan fiction community continues to fragment, a process which started in June 2001, they still generate a lot of interest.
The following chart is from Technorati and focuses on Cassandra Claire from August 2005 to August 2006.
The October 2005 peak coincides with the release of a chapter by her. The continual interest around June 2006 coincides with the Msscribe story being told by Charlotte Lennox.
Google Trends offers another view of Cassandra Claire over an extended period of time.
The 2004 interest is probably a result of her Very Secret Diaries, which she started on December 31, 2001. They ended around 2004. Her audience for that initially came from her Harry Potter fans who read her LiveJournal and then expanded as those fans talked her up in cross fandom forums.
The increase in interest in early 2006 starts around when Cassandra Claire's book news became more widespread and as she started removing her work from the Internet, started announcing that the Draco Trilogy was ending soon and that she was soon leaving fandom.
She also changed her name. Will it matter?
The IceRocket chart would seem to indicate no.
Msscribe, known mostly as a Big Name Fan in Harry Potter wank circles, became a big interesting 2006. The following chart shows interest in her in the latter part of 2006.
The chart includes the term wank. The chart was originally made bykheha in the conversation on my 2006 year in review post and the inclusion of that term was hers. The chart shows a continued interest in Cassandra Claire. It shows that interest in Cassandra Claire peaked a it when the Msscribe incident happened. Interest in Msscribe peaked when the Cassandra Claire plagiarism incident happened. After both incidents, their continued to be a continued interest in Msscribe but never really to the same extent as Cassandra Claire.
The above chart was made on BlogPulse and features Harry/Hermione Big Name Fans. Those BNFs are Vanceone, FPB and Mad Eyes Mike. Only one of the peaks for these Harry/Hermione peaks matches a peak on the BlogPulse chart featuring Harry/Hermione and that is the peak around October 15, 2006. This suggests that a pairing based BNF interest is not connected with interest in the pairing.
Fan Fiction Archives
Fandom size, fan fiction community size, interest in the fandom, could probably best be reflected by its fan fiction archives. How many authors are archived at a particular site, how many stories are archived at a site, when stories are archived, how many times a story gets read at an archived based on how many pieces of feedback that story gets, how many visitors a site gets per month can all help explain how the fan fiction community functions. Most of this data is hard to get, is time consuming to get. Some of it is time sensitive. Compounding the problems is that, especially for this fandom, there are so many archives that it is hard to put the data that is gotten into a usable format. Given all this, it means that much of the most important details that are necessary for serious statistical analysis are frustratingly out of reach.
One thing fan fiction archives can do is give an idea to the size of a fandom. Take the total number of stories posted to various archives from the same date. Add those numbers together. You get an idea as to how big a fandom is. The following is such an examination. The only problem is that it is not a good sample as the archives are not matched archive for archive. The first total is from July 2005. It has a total of 298,798 stories. The second total is from November 2005 and is 321,454. This latter number doesn't include the second largest Harry Potter fan fiction archive, Fiction Alley.
July 2005
AdultFanFiction.Net 3900
ashwinder.sycophanthex.com 1,465
CheckMated 2,069
Detention 698
erosnsappho.sycophanthex.com 189
ETC 227
FanDomination.Net 869
FanFics.Org 113
FanFiction.Net 192,941
FanFik.Pl 426
FanWorks.Org 12
FictionAlley 60,000
FicWad 184
Glass Onion 177
HarryPotterFanFiction.Com 19,758
HP Fandom 957
HP Romance 150
La Société des Femmes Dangereuses 56
lumos.sycophanthex.com 275
MuggleNet 3,016
occlumency.sycophanthex.com 358
Phoenix Phiction 69
Phoenixsong.net 635
PortKey 3,480
Primus Inter Pares 90
pureblood.sycophanthex.com 113
RestrictedSection 1,620
SugarQuill 1,252
The Hex Files 459
The Silver Snitch 2,232
theburrow.sycophanthex.com 108
Unredeemed.net 100
Veritaserum.com 800
Total 298,798
October 2005
FanDomination.Net 966
FanFiction.Net 273,736
FanWorks.Org 46
FicWad 933
Glass Onion 177
Quizilla 43,511
Twisting the Hellmouth 1,617
Wonderful World of Makebelieve 468
Total 321,454
The following was done on January 9, 2007. Where the totals weren't found, the number was left blank:
9-Jan-07 Archive
12292 AdultFanFiction.Net
4310 archive.sycophanthex.com
1895 ashwinder.sycophanthex.com
2299 CheckMated
Detention
1359 DracoAndGinny.Com
375 erosnsappho.sycophanthex.com
ETC
991 FanDomination.Net
147 FanFics.Org
280216 FanFiction.Net
FanFik.Pl
46 FanWorks.Org
70,000 FictionAlley
1141 FicWad
3586 Forever Fandom
2 Gay Stories
177 Glass Onion
62 Godric's Hat
33320 HarryPotterFanFiction.Com
3598 HP Fandom
HP Romance
56 La Société des Femmes Dangereuses
532 lumos.sycophanthex.com
6951 MuggleNet
556 occlumency.sycophanthex.com
70 Phoenix Phiction
1051 Phoenixsong.net
5220 PortKey
Primus Inter Pares
195 pureblood.sycophanthex.com
43,463 Quizilla
RestrictedSection
28 Room of Requirement
35 Sense and Sensibility
674 Simply Undeniable
1,350 SugarQuill
1604 The Hex Files
3282 The Silver Snitch
191 theburrow.sycophanthex.com
1702 Twisting the Hellmouth
113 Unredeemed.net
1125 Veritaserum.com
471 Wonderful World of Makebelieve
Total 484485
The total for January 2006 of the archives in the sample is 484485 which suggests roughly 50% growth over a year and a half. This is undoubtedly a bit flawed as the first sample and the most recent sample do not contain the same amount of archives. Added to this, the number of archives that have Harry Potter fan fiction number in the thousands so getting an accurate count is not possible. The original list of archives included archives suggested by users on SugarQuill.
Another way to look at fan fiction archives is to monitor growth over time. The two following charts look at just that on four fan fiction archives.
The growth on FanFiction.Net appears to be somewhat predictable. It almost is a straight line. This compares with AdultFanFiction.Net, FanFics.Org and HarryPotterFanFiction.Com where the posting patterns over time are not so linear. FanFiction.Net's linear posting patterns even appear to hold up in the short term:
It seems like a safe assumption that the Harry Potter fan fiction community will continue to grow, helped fueled by the release of a new book and a new movie coming out soon.
Alexa provides a couple of tools to help compare sites. One such tool allows for the comparison of reach of various sites. The chart below examines the reach of Fiction Alley, Sugar Quill, Portkey, harryloveshermione.com and HarryPotterFanFiction.Com since 2005.
This chart is difficult. One one hand, it seems like that ultimately, the reach of Harry Potter fan fiction archives is declining. SugarQuill, PortKey and HarryLovesHermione.Com certainly end 2006 lower than they started in 2005. Only FictionAlley seems to have gained anything in that two year period, and that is down from its high in the beginning of 2006. This seems to counter what FanFiction.Net is showing: Steady growth.
The chart can also be compared to one which shows daily traffic in that same period:
This chart shows something interesting. Fiction Alley's traffic volume took serious hits during the periods when the Msscribe incident was being told and when the Cassandra Claire plagiarism debacle was being discussed. Its popularity appears to have peaked in mid 2006 when Cassandra Claire posted the final chapter of the Draco Trilogy. This may just be a coincidence. Fiction Alley has also been hailed as the biggest Harry Potter fan fiction archive for a long time. There have been undercurrents that others who would try to displace it should fear, particularly the Leaky Cauldron, a Harry Potter news site. Despite this, HarryPotterFanFiction.Com and Port Key both frequently had more traffic than Fiction Alley.
Sugar Quill's jumps in volumes coincide with the release new movies and a new book. This stands in contrast with other fandoms which do not share similar correlations.
In more recent Harry Potter fan fiction archive history, FanFiction.Net continues to remain dominant:
FanFiction.Net's Harry Potter fan fiction continue to be talked about more than other sites. Given its size, and it being consistent in having new stories, it is likely that it will continue to be dominant for some time.
Though other charts can tell a different story. Even with that view, FanFiction.Net references remain rather consistent whereas Fiction Alley is prone to more peaks and troughs.
Conclusion
And there you have it. There are many factors which affect the Harry Potter fan fiction community. The individual communities based on Big Name Fans and pairings work in tandem with each other and independently of each other. The community has things that can be predictable but when looked at as smaller communities with in the context of the whole, it becomes harder to predict as fans, not canon, cause ripples in the community.
Follow Up
In having posted this to the LiveJournal community Fanthropology and HP_Essay, several issues came up:
The early numbers mentioning interest as demonstrated by people listing Harry Potter as an interest are not accurate as LiveJournal cuts off those numbers after a certain point around 450.
Another issue, my assumption was that people searching generally for fan fiction were looking for looking for het or gen. While I chatted with some people who agreed, this may not be entirely accurate. It is possible that people searching for harry potter fan fiction may be new enough in to the fan community that they are not aware of the proper terminology to help them narrow a search. It also assumes a certain level of heterocentrism that may not be true.
The third issue explains the bump in interest in Snape/Hermione pairing. There may be a shift occurring in the community as segments break away from the WIKTT mailing list and started embracing LiveJournal more. The community also has an archive in flux. Lastly, the community had a large and popular holiday ficathon which drew in a number of new writers. This may explain the big bump.
Nanowriting is believed to be the cause of the lack of interest in the fan fiction community and helps explain the November dips.
The last issue involves the inclusion of vanceone. He was listed a BNF. He apparently is not the big BNF I assumed he was but is more well known as Harry/Hermione wanker.
And just when you think you're done...
Comments and stray thought come up which make you want to go back and look at other things.
The following chart's data was gathered on January 7, 2007. It was made in regards to comments ship size on LiveJournal not necessarily being reflected in the data presented. Five communities were taken sort of at random based on the criteria they listed the ship as an interest and had the ship name was reflected in their community name as a signal the community was oriented towards that pairing.
It seems to show that the Harry/Hermione pairing is the biggest het community in terms of membership. Harry/Draco is the largest slash pairing community, totally blowing away their het counterpart in terms of membership.
Harry/Hermione is the het pairing with the largest average comments posted in reply to posts. Harry/Draco is the slash pairing with the largest average comments posted in reply to posts. Remus/Lupin, the second largest average reply is larger than the Harry/Hermione community in this regard.
This all seems to suggest that the data reflected by BlogPulse's chart is not necessarily reflected in other data.
The above chart shows references to mpreg versus Mary Sues. Mary Sues frequently seem to be something which afflicts hetfic. Mpreg seems to be something which afflicts, happens in slash. If they are used as barometers of their reflective communities, then it would appear that slash and het trade off in terms of general interest in the larger Harry Potter community, with both communities peaking at other times.
I don't suppose anyone can explain the bump around Christmas for Harry Potter mpreg?
Introduction
This is an attempt to look at existing and historical relationships in the Harry Potter fan fiction community using numerical data. (And hey, if anyone would like to help me make this publishable, I'd be much obliged. My e-mail is partly_bouncy@livejournal.com.) This post is also image intensive.
Most of this information was culled from
FanHistory.Com on January 5 and January 6, 2007. The mailing list data is accurate as of December 20, 2006 and various charts from external sites give timeline references as to when that information was gathered. Because of the sheer size of the Harry Potter fan fiction community, it is not possible to include every community, every mailing list, every fan fiction archive in this sample. The data thus has some shortcomings. These issues will be addressed as they appear in the meta analysis.Raw Data
Most of the raw data used in this analysis can be found on my user sandbox at FanHistory.Com. If anyone desires it, please feel free to contact me and I'll send you the link for the excel table.
Fandom Size
How big is the Harry Potter fandom? It is hard to even begin to grasp that. A small sample of some 10 archives in December 2006 put the total Harry Potter stories at 321,454. On January 6, 2007, 380 communities and 475 users on LiveJournal list Harry Potter as an interest. As of January 6, 2007, there are are 4,268 mailing lists that in some form or other touch on Harry Potter. "Harry Potter" fan fiction as a Google search brought up 1,510,000 results on Google on January 6, 2007. The Dramonine LiveJournal community, a ship specific community, has 1,536 members as of January 2, 2007. In one of the busiest months in the Harry Potter fan fiction communities, over 18,331 messages were posted to various mailing lists. The size is mind boggling. And this from a community that really did not spring into existence until 1999.
Correlations
In earlier meta posted to
fanthropology, I had looked at the relationship between canon release and fan activity. In both the Supernatural analysis and a more broad analysis, there was almost no correlation, suggesting that fan activity was random, not directly related, not timed to the release of canon.For this analysis, canon was defined as book releases, movie releases and DVD releases. The release of canon was primarily concerned with the United States and the United Kingdom. The dates used can be found here. In addition to those dates, some international dates have been included to help reflect the international component of the Harry Potter fan fiction community. The international dates are also reflected on the table.
Using the data collected, the following correlations were computed:
Canon Release/Mailing Lists 0.257949088
Canon Release/Archives Founded 0.262431517
Canon Release/LiveJournal Communities 0.231879623
Canon Release/Cease and Desist Letters 0.146805055
Mailing Lists/Archive Founded 0.223355112
Mailing Lists/LiveJournal Communities 0.584535484
Mailing Lists/Cease and Desist Letters 0.409257429
Archive Founded/LiveJournal Communities 0.232095392
Archive Founded/Cease and Desist Letters -0.40824829
LiveJournal Communities/Cease and Desist Letters 0.636043102
Most of these correlations suggest little relationship exists between the two variables. The release of canon does have a meaningful correlation with fannish activities.
There is a some what meaningful correlation between cease and desist letters sent in the Harry Potter fandom and the creation of LiveJournal communities by that fandom. This relationship is some what confusing. It may suggest a fan response to threats from TPTB by retreating to LiveJournal where they feel less legally threatened. It may also help explain the negative and somewhat much less meaningful correlation between Harry Potter fan fiction archive founding and cease and desist letters being sent, suggesting that fans were hesitant to create archives when they thought they might be in legal trouble if they did that. Or the two could have a somewhat meaningful correlation because of random chance, that there is no logical reason for them to correlate.
The other some what meaningful correlation is between mailing list volume and LiveJournal community creation. This make some sense as it suggests that fans are active at the same time across different on-line mediums.
When correlations are based on yearly totals, rather than monthly, the picture changes quite dramatically and more more meaningful correlations appear.
LiveJournal/Canon by Year 0.541134272
Canon by Year/Archive Founding 0.620924457
LiveJournal by Year/Archive Founding 0.551220007
LiveJournal by Year/Cease and Desist 0.439698206
Canon by Year/Cease and Desist 0.274509804
Archive founding by Year/Cease and Desist 0.130855981
If LiveJournal community creation is correlated with canon release on a yearly basis, rather than monthly, the correlation is 0.541134272. This is a much stronger correlation than when looked at monthly. To give a vague visual idea of what a this looks like, see the chart below.
Canon release and fan fiction archive creation also show a much more meaningful correlation when looked at by year.
This can be viewed visually as:
Influential Stories
The Harry Potter fan fiction community has a number of influential stories. A sample of 19 stories listed as influential Harry Potter stories on FanHistory.Com was taken. The list includes the following (labeled by ship):
Draco/Hermione Basketcase by Attica
Draco/Hermione We'll Always Have Paris by Melissa D
Draco/Hermione Once Upon A Thyme by zensho
Draco/Hermione No Longer Helpless by DB2020
Draco/Hermione Future Parents Program by Avari20
Draco/Hermione The God of the Lost by Gravidy
Snape/Hermione Pawn to Queen by Riley
Snape/Hermione Letter from Exile One Merciful Morning
Snape/Hermione Beyond the Silver Rainbow by Lupinlover
Snape/Harry Midnight Confessions by Majolique
Snape/Harry A Different Lesson by Unquiet
Snape/Harry Two Loveable Young Women by Kangeiko
Snape/Harry Tea series by Telanau
Snape/Harry Too Wise to Woo Peaceably by JayKay
Snape/Harry Marching off to War by Sushi
Draco/Ginny Why I'm Glad Ginny Is Dating Draco Malfoy by Sarea Okelani
Draco/Ginny Dragon Kisses by Davesmom
Draco/Ginny The Doppelganger Dilemma by Mynuet
Draco/Ginny Polyjuice Potion by Davesmom
Draco/Ginny Life Canvas, by Jade Okelani
A one was given to the story for each year that the story was written. 2001 was, based on this sample, the peak year for influential stories being written in the Harry Potter fandom. This was one year before the peak release of Harry Potter canon, which happened in 2002. Also of note, there is a 0.822803195 correlation between the yearly volume of canon release and yearly total of publication of influential Harry Potter stories. This is a significant number, especially when compared to other correlations looked at so far.
In chart form this looks like:
It shows that Snape/Hermione peaked in 2001, Draco/Hermione peaked in 2005, Snape/Harry peaked in 2001 and Draco/Ginny never really peaked but plateaued across several years.
One of the problems with this examining this particular category is that the sample size is rather small. It needs a larger sample to make better cross pairing category conclusions. The reason for lack of a larger sample sizes is that not many pairing pages on FanHistory.Com. In the cases of some stories, they were linked to external archives which did not list the upload dates of the story.
Mailing Lists
The following chart was made in regards to a comment on my 2006 year in review post. It looks at posting volume for mailing lists in 2006 which had more than 24 posts in March 2006.
It demonstrates quite nicely one of the issues with some Harry Potter mailing lists: Lack of consistent posting volume over time. Hermione_FanFictionHP has huge volume for two months and then basically drops off the face of the earth. This is true for other mailing lists, especially earlier in the fandom's history. Some mailing lists had huge volume for a few months in 2001 but when LiveJournal became more influential in fandom, their posting volume dropped to the point where most were lucky to have two posts a month. HPforGrownups is a mailing list for the discussion of Harry Potter canon. While the group has been subject to some fighting, details of which can be found on FanHistory.Com, it has stayed some what true to that, even if those canon interpretations swing in favor of certain ships. Despite a lack of serious canon, the list's volume never dropped below 1,200 posts for a month for the year.
Of the nine lists shown in that chart, three are slash based, two are het based, two are founded for the discussion of stories, one is character centered and one is for canon discussion. This demonstrates that various factions in the Harry Potter fan fiction community are active and none have really dropped off the face of the earth in the medium of mailing lists.
Ships
It is at this time that some of the cold hard data that I collected is abandoned in order to look at trend graphs generated by services like Google, IceRocket, Technorati and Blog Pulse at it pertains to Harry Potter pairings. Most of this data is much harder to quantify as they do not offer solid numbers and unlike my stats, it is not always clear what they are counting.
The following is a chart comparing the references to Harry Potter slash to Harry Potter fanfic generated by BlogPulse. Fanfic was the word chosen because it resulted in greater hits than "fan fiction" offered which seemed to demonstrate a word choice preference amongst Harry Potter fans.
It is noteworthy that Harry Potter slash almost always has a greater percentage of posts in the six month period looked at. It is unclear exactly, to this author, why there are substantial dips in posts around early October and November 18. This chart may also help demonstrate that the slash component of the Harry Potter fan fiction community is actually bigger than the het component, despite the attention that the het community gets for its various pairing wars and appearances on Fandom Wank.
The following chart was created in August 2006. It shows the references on Technorati from August 2005 to August 2006.
There is a distinct trough in October 2005. It doesn't seem to pick up in November 2005. October was the release of one of the books in China in Chinese and in the native language in Taiwan. November 2005 was when one of the Harry Potter movies was released in theaters for most countries in the world. It would seem to suggest that the release of movies is not a driving force in the Harry/Draco community and that slashy vibes are more from the books than the movies.
Compare that with a similar chart from Technorati on the same date, only looking at the Harry/Hermione pairing:
The Harry/Hermione,like the Harry/Draco community, had a trough in October 2006. The pairing appears to have seen a major bump from the movie. This may have been fueled, in part, because there are components of the Harry/Hermione fandom who are vocal supporters of the real person fic pairing of Dan/Emma which could help tie the pairing into the movie, along with the book.
This again should be contrasted with the Ron/Hermione pairing during the same period:
This community has a trough but a much smaller on in October. The volume picked up again big time around the time of the movie before leveling back off again. It has another large peak around the time that the Charlotte Lennox story was being told. This may or may not be a coincidence. Some of the December 2005 peaking also coincides with Sugar Quill's birthday.
These three communities can be compared side by in the last six months of 2006:
On this chart, the various pairings all generally seem to mirror each other, going up and down at the same time. It almost suggests that interest in the fandom waxes and wanes during the same periods, that interest is similar, regardless of pairings.
There are a couple of big peaks in this chart, with all three pairings peaking at the same time. This includes a peak in early August 2006. This peak is only for Harry/Draco and Ron/Hermione. The Harry/Hermione pairing peaked a few days earlier. There is another peak in mid-September. The Harry/Hermione jump in interest is again much lower when compared to the other pairings. Interest in all three pairings seems to almost totally drop off around November 18. All of these peaks and low points happen with minimal canon influence. Nothing significant canon wise was released in this period.
Snape is one of the characters which draws a lot of attention and pairings based on him are different than Harry/Draco in where their historical roots are. Snape fandom largely comes from media fandom. (Harry/Hermione, Harry/Draco draws largely from first time members of fandom. Ron/Hermione and Harry/Ginny have feet in both but are more canon centered than most of the media fandom based Snape pairings. It is best explained by this venn diagram right here!) The following is a chart similar to the other one but looking at the Snape pairings of Snape/Hermione, Snape/Harry and Snape/Ron.
In early December 2006, the Snape/Hermione pairing peaks and peaks big time. It leaves the other pairings looking puny in comparison. This despite the Snape/Harry pairing being the one mentioned more for most of the time period on that graph. I cannot even begin to explain why.
In rounding up the pairings and segue into the next section on Big Name Fans, the following chart is one of the few that could be obtained from Google Trends.
The above chart compares the Google Trends for the following key phrases: cassandra claire, fiction alley, harry potter slash, harry potter fan fiction. The start of this chart is 2004.
No pairings ever offered enough trend data for Google to give a chart but it did give one for Cassandra Claire. The drop off in interest in Cassandra Claire on that chart is around the time that her Very Secret Diaries officially came to an end. The renewed interest in mid 2005 was during the same period that a new Harry Potter book was released which seems to signal, based on this chart, a general uptic in interest for all Harry Potter fan fiction. It also helps explain why Fiction Alley appears for the only time in that two year period. The increased interest in Cassandra Claire in mid 2006 coincides with the Charlotte Lennox story being told and the larger 2006 interest coincides with the airing of Cassandra Claire's plagiarism. Despite the interest in that part of the Harry Potter fandom, it did not appear to create any interest in knowing more about the rest of the Harry Potter fandom.
The 2004 peak for harry potter fan fiction and harry potter slash happened around the same time that a movie was released in theaters. While other variables examined by numbers earlier do not correlate with canon release, this chart appears to show a strong correlation. It also explains the up tick in interest in November 2005 when another movie was released. What is most interesting though is that the books appear, based on this chart, to create a greater interest then the movies. Slash mirrors the interest in fan fiction. It shares the same ups and down and is always lower. This suggests that hetfic and gen are larger in the Harry Potter fandom than the slash contingent.
Big Name Fans
The Harry Potter fan fiction community is one of Big Name Fans. While the importance of this type of individual seems to be on the wane as the Harry Potter fan fiction community continues to fragment, a process which started in June 2001, they still generate a lot of interest.
The following chart is from Technorati and focuses on Cassandra Claire from August 2005 to August 2006.
The October 2005 peak coincides with the release of a chapter by her. The continual interest around June 2006 coincides with the Msscribe story being told by Charlotte Lennox.
Google Trends offers another view of Cassandra Claire over an extended period of time.
The 2004 interest is probably a result of her Very Secret Diaries, which she started on December 31, 2001. They ended around 2004. Her audience for that initially came from her Harry Potter fans who read her LiveJournal and then expanded as those fans talked her up in cross fandom forums.
The increase in interest in early 2006 starts around when Cassandra Claire's book news became more widespread and as she started removing her work from the Internet, started announcing that the Draco Trilogy was ending soon and that she was soon leaving fandom.
She also changed her name. Will it matter?
The IceRocket chart would seem to indicate no.
Msscribe, known mostly as a Big Name Fan in Harry Potter wank circles, became a big interesting 2006. The following chart shows interest in her in the latter part of 2006.
The chart includes the term wank. The chart was originally made by
kheha in the conversation on my 2006 year in review post and the inclusion of that term was hers. The chart shows a continued interest in Cassandra Claire. It shows that interest in Cassandra Claire peaked a it when the Msscribe incident happened. Interest in Msscribe peaked when the Cassandra Claire plagiarism incident happened. After both incidents, their continued to be a continued interest in Msscribe but never really to the same extent as Cassandra Claire.
The above chart was made on BlogPulse and features Harry/Hermione Big Name Fans. Those BNFs are Vanceone, FPB and Mad Eyes Mike. Only one of the peaks for these Harry/Hermione peaks matches a peak on the BlogPulse chart featuring Harry/Hermione and that is the peak around October 15, 2006. This suggests that a pairing based BNF interest is not connected with interest in the pairing.
Fan Fiction Archives
Fandom size, fan fiction community size, interest in the fandom, could probably best be reflected by its fan fiction archives. How many authors are archived at a particular site, how many stories are archived at a site, when stories are archived, how many times a story gets read at an archived based on how many pieces of feedback that story gets, how many visitors a site gets per month can all help explain how the fan fiction community functions. Most of this data is hard to get, is time consuming to get. Some of it is time sensitive. Compounding the problems is that, especially for this fandom, there are so many archives that it is hard to put the data that is gotten into a usable format. Given all this, it means that much of the most important details that are necessary for serious statistical analysis are frustratingly out of reach.
One thing fan fiction archives can do is give an idea to the size of a fandom. Take the total number of stories posted to various archives from the same date. Add those numbers together. You get an idea as to how big a fandom is. The following is such an examination. The only problem is that it is not a good sample as the archives are not matched archive for archive. The first total is from July 2005. It has a total of 298,798 stories. The second total is from November 2005 and is 321,454. This latter number doesn't include the second largest Harry Potter fan fiction archive, Fiction Alley.
July 2005
AdultFanFiction.Net 3900
ashwinder.sycophanthex.com 1,465
CheckMated 2,069
Detention 698
erosnsappho.sycophanthex.com 189
ETC 227
FanDomination.Net 869
FanFics.Org 113
FanFiction.Net 192,941
FanFik.Pl 426
FanWorks.Org 12
FictionAlley 60,000
FicWad 184
Glass Onion 177
HarryPotterFanFiction.Com 19,758
HP Fandom 957
HP Romance 150
La Société des Femmes Dangereuses 56
lumos.sycophanthex.com 275
MuggleNet 3,016
occlumency.sycophanthex.com 358
Phoenix Phiction 69
Phoenixsong.net 635
PortKey 3,480
Primus Inter Pares 90
pureblood.sycophanthex.com 113
RestrictedSection 1,620
SugarQuill 1,252
The Hex Files 459
The Silver Snitch 2,232
theburrow.sycophanthex.com 108
Unredeemed.net 100
Veritaserum.com 800
Total 298,798
October 2005
FanDomination.Net 966
FanFiction.Net 273,736
FanWorks.Org 46
FicWad 933
Glass Onion 177
Quizilla 43,511
Twisting the Hellmouth 1,617
Wonderful World of Makebelieve 468
Total 321,454
The following was done on January 9, 2007. Where the totals weren't found, the number was left blank:
9-Jan-07 Archive
12292 AdultFanFiction.Net
4310 archive.sycophanthex.com
1895 ashwinder.sycophanthex.com
2299 CheckMated
Detention
1359 DracoAndGinny.Com
375 erosnsappho.sycophanthex.com
ETC
991 FanDomination.Net
147 FanFics.Org
280216 FanFiction.Net
FanFik.Pl
46 FanWorks.Org
70,000 FictionAlley
1141 FicWad
3586 Forever Fandom
2 Gay Stories
177 Glass Onion
62 Godric's Hat
33320 HarryPotterFanFiction.Com
3598 HP Fandom
HP Romance
56 La Société des Femmes Dangereuses
532 lumos.sycophanthex.com
6951 MuggleNet
556 occlumency.sycophanthex.com
70 Phoenix Phiction
1051 Phoenixsong.net
5220 PortKey
Primus Inter Pares
195 pureblood.sycophanthex.com
43,463 Quizilla
RestrictedSection
28 Room of Requirement
35 Sense and Sensibility
674 Simply Undeniable
1,350 SugarQuill
1604 The Hex Files
3282 The Silver Snitch
191 theburrow.sycophanthex.com
1702 Twisting the Hellmouth
113 Unredeemed.net
1125 Veritaserum.com
471 Wonderful World of Makebelieve
Total 484485
The total for January 2006 of the archives in the sample is 484485 which suggests roughly 50% growth over a year and a half. This is undoubtedly a bit flawed as the first sample and the most recent sample do not contain the same amount of archives. Added to this, the number of archives that have Harry Potter fan fiction number in the thousands so getting an accurate count is not possible. The original list of archives included archives suggested by users on SugarQuill.
Another way to look at fan fiction archives is to monitor growth over time. The two following charts look at just that on four fan fiction archives.
The growth on FanFiction.Net appears to be somewhat predictable. It almost is a straight line. This compares with AdultFanFiction.Net, FanFics.Org and HarryPotterFanFiction.Com where the posting patterns over time are not so linear. FanFiction.Net's linear posting patterns even appear to hold up in the short term:
It seems like a safe assumption that the Harry Potter fan fiction community will continue to grow, helped fueled by the release of a new book and a new movie coming out soon.
Alexa provides a couple of tools to help compare sites. One such tool allows for the comparison of reach of various sites. The chart below examines the reach of Fiction Alley, Sugar Quill, Portkey, harryloveshermione.com and HarryPotterFanFiction.Com since 2005.
This chart is difficult. One one hand, it seems like that ultimately, the reach of Harry Potter fan fiction archives is declining. SugarQuill, PortKey and HarryLovesHermione.Com certainly end 2006 lower than they started in 2005. Only FictionAlley seems to have gained anything in that two year period, and that is down from its high in the beginning of 2006. This seems to counter what FanFiction.Net is showing: Steady growth.
The chart can also be compared to one which shows daily traffic in that same period:
This chart shows something interesting. Fiction Alley's traffic volume took serious hits during the periods when the Msscribe incident was being told and when the Cassandra Claire plagiarism debacle was being discussed. Its popularity appears to have peaked in mid 2006 when Cassandra Claire posted the final chapter of the Draco Trilogy. This may just be a coincidence. Fiction Alley has also been hailed as the biggest Harry Potter fan fiction archive for a long time. There have been undercurrents that others who would try to displace it should fear, particularly the Leaky Cauldron, a Harry Potter news site. Despite this, HarryPotterFanFiction.Com and Port Key both frequently had more traffic than Fiction Alley.
Sugar Quill's jumps in volumes coincide with the release new movies and a new book. This stands in contrast with other fandoms which do not share similar correlations.
In more recent Harry Potter fan fiction archive history, FanFiction.Net continues to remain dominant:
FanFiction.Net's Harry Potter fan fiction continue to be talked about more than other sites. Given its size, and it being consistent in having new stories, it is likely that it will continue to be dominant for some time.
Though other charts can tell a different story. Even with that view, FanFiction.Net references remain rather consistent whereas Fiction Alley is prone to more peaks and troughs.
Conclusion
And there you have it. There are many factors which affect the Harry Potter fan fiction community. The individual communities based on Big Name Fans and pairings work in tandem with each other and independently of each other. The community has things that can be predictable but when looked at as smaller communities with in the context of the whole, it becomes harder to predict as fans, not canon, cause ripples in the community.
Follow Up
In having posted this to the LiveJournal community Fanthropology and HP_Essay, several issues came up:
The early numbers mentioning interest as demonstrated by people listing Harry Potter as an interest are not accurate as LiveJournal cuts off those numbers after a certain point around 450.
Another issue, my assumption was that people searching generally for fan fiction were looking for looking for het or gen. While I chatted with some people who agreed, this may not be entirely accurate. It is possible that people searching for harry potter fan fiction may be new enough in to the fan community that they are not aware of the proper terminology to help them narrow a search. It also assumes a certain level of heterocentrism that may not be true.
The third issue explains the bump in interest in Snape/Hermione pairing. There may be a shift occurring in the community as segments break away from the WIKTT mailing list and started embracing LiveJournal more. The community also has an archive in flux. Lastly, the community had a large and popular holiday ficathon which drew in a number of new writers. This may explain the big bump.
Nanowriting is believed to be the cause of the lack of interest in the fan fiction community and helps explain the November dips.
The last issue involves the inclusion of vanceone. He was listed a BNF. He apparently is not the big BNF I assumed he was but is more well known as Harry/Hermione wanker.
And just when you think you're done...
Comments and stray thought come up which make you want to go back and look at other things.
The following chart's data was gathered on January 7, 2007. It was made in regards to comments ship size on LiveJournal not necessarily being reflected in the data presented. Five communities were taken sort of at random based on the criteria they listed the ship as an interest and had the ship name was reflected in their community name as a signal the community was oriented towards that pairing.
It seems to show that the Harry/Hermione pairing is the biggest het community in terms of membership. Harry/Draco is the largest slash pairing community, totally blowing away their het counterpart in terms of membership.
Harry/Hermione is the het pairing with the largest average comments posted in reply to posts. Harry/Draco is the slash pairing with the largest average comments posted in reply to posts. Remus/Lupin, the second largest average reply is larger than the Harry/Hermione community in this regard.
This all seems to suggest that the data reflected by BlogPulse's chart is not necessarily reflected in other data.
The above chart shows references to mpreg versus Mary Sues. Mary Sues frequently seem to be something which afflicts hetfic. Mpreg seems to be something which afflicts, happens in slash. If they are used as barometers of their reflective communities, then it would appear that slash and het trade off in terms of general interest in the larger Harry Potter community, with both communities peaking at other times.
I don't suppose anyone can explain the bump around Christmas for Harry Potter mpreg?
