Statistics. How Much Fan Fiction Is There on the Web? How Many Fans? Who Are They?

Commentary
Title:	Statistics. How Much Fan Fiction Is There on the Web? How Many Fans? Who Are They?
Commentator:	Mary Ellen Curtin
Date(s):	2000
Medium:	print, online
Fandom:	meta
External Links:	available online here
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Statistics. How Much Fan Fiction Is There on the Web? How Many Fans? Who Are They? is an essay written by Mary Ellen Curtin in 2000 explaining her statistic methodology on online fandom to that date. It was cited in Jae's essay "Young, Female, Single? A Study of Demographics and Writing-/Reading-Habits of Fanfiction Writers and Readers".

Excerpt:

How much fan fiction is there?

One way to address this is to look at the major fanfic archives, the sum of which is a lower bound on the total amount of fanfic.

The first time I did this survey, in June 2000, I came up with a total of more than 80,000 stories and estimated that there were at least 250,000 pieces of fanfic online. By late September 2000 my total was over 130,000 stories, so I figured 500,000 stories is a deeply conservative estimate for the total at the time. Probably the true total then was more like one million. Staggering, eh?