A deep dive into the popularity of various fandoms through the lens of historic data on the fanfiction created for those fandoms and posted on the popular FanFiction.net website
The goal:
Take the viewer on a journey through the rise and fall of various fandoms using information scraped from historic records of the FanFiction.net website
Background on the subject matter:
Fanfiction is a popular form of derivative work created based on any available canon story. It can be developed based on any medium and while not a modern invention (historic examples of fanfiction include several of the works of William Shakespeare (Fan Fiction, 2022)),the internet has made the distribution and sharing of fanfiction far easier
Founded in 1998 by Xing Li FanFiction.net was one of the first websites to allow for fanfiction to be posted from any fandom (FanFiction.Net, 2022). At the time, and still to this day, many fanfiction websites cater to a specific fandom, featuring only works relevant to that fandom. According to statshow.com, Fanfiction.net ranks as one of the top 1000 popular websites worldwide (FanFiction, 2022).
The data:
The data used in this visualization was derived from web scraping the historic archives of FanFiction.net hosted on the Wayback Machine internet archive. Data covers archived images of the categories page of the website during the years 2000-2022.
Notably data crawls by Wayback Machine are much more readily available for FanFiction.net starting in 2010 and are variable as to how deep in the website they went. Data prior to 2010 is provided to help with the visual narrative, but may appear more reliable in the data set then it actually is. There are several years prior to 2010 that may only have 2-3 data points available from Wayback Machine.
The website has gone through several major iterations and changes during it's lifespan. Please view the archives on Wayback Machine if you wish to view more of this evolution (Wayback Machine FanFiction.net, 2022).
Citations:
Fan Fiction. (2022, 07 24). Retrieved from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_fiction
FanFiction. (2022, 07 24). Retrieved from StatShow: https://www.statshow.com/www/fanfiction.net
FanFiction.Net. (2022, 07 24). Retrieved from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FanFiction.Net
Wayback Machine FanFiction.net. (2022, 07 24). Retrieved from Internet Archive Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/fanfiction.net