925,510,718 words of My Little Pony fanfiction · 5:17am May 29th, 2014
So I finally figured out how to use a JSON parser. Thanks to the fimfic archive this means that I now know with certainty the amount of words of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fanfiction that has been written up until April 15, 2014.
925,510,718 words.
We're seriously about to hit a billion words! I love this fandom!
If you want the details, and a bunch of interesting numbers, check out my blog post continue reading.
As of April 15, 2014, there were over 925 million words of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fanfiction hosted on fimfiction.net.
Let's just stop right there for a moment and consider just how mindbogglingly huge that number is. According to Forbes, the average adult reading speed is about 300 words per minute. If that adult spent 12 hours a day reading My Little Pony fanfiction, it would take him or her almost twelve years to read all of the fanfic on fimfiction.net.
All of those words are contained on the 79236 total stories on the site. To put that in perspective, if every one of those fanfictions were published and put inside the Library of Congress, My Little Pony fanfiction would account for 0.22% of books there.
Another interesting aspect of this is if we only decided to read "the best" fanfiction. Let's say, the top 1%. If there was somehow a perfect way to sort all of that fanfic so that a reader only saw the top 1%; that's still over 9 million words. If you read at an average adult pace every day for four hours a day, it would take you 129 days to read all of it. And that's "the best" fanfic! That's only the fanfic for one fandom on one website.
I know those are some scary numbers and while it's not conceivably possible to read all of the good fanfiction out there, it's worth trying, because these stories are amazing.
The rest of this post is a bunch of raw data I got by parsing through the metadata of all those stories. Special thanks to the fimfic archive for the JSON file. The code is on Github if you want to check my work. Because a lot of the data skews towards the outliers, I've added a "median" amount for some categories.
Total stories: 79236
Total amount of words: 925,510,718
On average that is roughly 11680 words for each story.
The Median wordcount for a story is 3859 words.
There are 1266 stories that have over 100 thousand words.
These are the ratings that have been assigned to each fic. The left axis is the amount of stories.
2/5ths of the stories are actually complete. Impressive.
Average views per story: 992.73. Median view amount: 338
Average Likes per story: 65.8 Median Likes: 14
Average Dislikes per story: 6.5. Median Dislikes: 3
Average comments per story: 48.7. Median Comment amount: 11
Number of stories without a single comment: 12462
Stories on FiMfiction can have multiple genre tags. Each percentage is out of the total of all fics on the site.
This data may be skewed as fimfiction.net is not the only place that carries MLP fanfiction, but it is the only source I used. Because of this, we may have already passed one billion words. Feel free to comment on what other questions you might have that could be answered with an analysis of Fanfic metadata.
It's somewhat likely we already passed one billion. I'm thinking of stories like Project Horizons (1,5 million words) that are not on fimfiction.
Does this json data include things like views, referalls, ratings? I'd love to know the average rating of a fimfic story, the total amount of views, the site with the most/least referalls, ...
2155789
Yes, it does.
Average views per story: 992.73. Median view amount: 338
Average Likes per story: 65.8 Median Likes: 14
Average Dislikes per story: 6.5. Median Dislikes: 3
There's no data for the referrals though. And there's no data for number of favorites. I'd love to know that.
You can scroll down here to see the data I had to work with.
If we're thinking about MLP fanfiction not just on FiMfiction, then we've definitely passed one billion words. I mean mlpaudiobooks.net has a far more active Russian speaking community than english. These are stories that will probably never be translated into English or make it to FiMfiction. And that's not including all the google doc stories or the stories on fanfiction.net that aren't on fimfiction.
1T,11T,TTT,TTT,T11,001,T1T
That is the number in balanced ternary:
I am of the opinion that the show would have been more alien, if it would use different base, Weights&Measures, currency, and timekeeping.
Fascinating blog post. I'm guessing it wouldn't be possible to make a list of the top 1000 authors in terms of followers (or views, or stories published, or comments, etc), would it?
2331587
In terms of followers... probably not. The current fimfiction API only works with individual stories, not authors. So I don't have that data.
However, Stories published, views, and comments should be doable...
I'd just need to write a java program to output that.
2331636 if I send you a recipe for delicious mint brownies, do you think you could do that? :scootaangel:
2331636 if I send you a recipe for delicious mint brownies, do you think you could do that? :scootaangel:
2331674
Y'know... Deal. I could use a recipe for mint brownies.