Beneath the microscope, you contain galaxies.
Take a gander at the new site statistics page. If knighty made a post about this, I missed it.
Funny how blog posts are going up while stories posted and users are going down. Some of that's my fault. 
AFAIK there are no more author statistics except on individual author pages. I miss the list of the most-popular authors. What will I gripe about now?
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Huh, given how often they climb the feature box I have to admit that bit about the M-T-E ratio rather surprised me. Was rather sure there were more 'M' stories than that.
3314979 M stories are a minority of stories, and readers who read M stories are a minority of users. But some of the users who read M stories read a whole lot of them.
In the search bar at the top of the site, if you set it to search by user and hit search, it brings up all the accounts on the site sorted by recently joined. You can then change the order to "followers" and it'll start with the most followed.
There's always a way to find something to gripe about, Bad Horse!
Actually the number of stories seems pretty stable throughout season 5. It only dropped during the long long hiatus.
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They used to make the featured story box a lot more than they do nowadays; they actually have no overall advantage in terms of being featured, though if you take into account the fact that it is harder for them to get featured than non-mature stories, they have a small edge. The most popular tag combo is teen + sex by far.
Incidentally, it is pretty much all mature + sex in terms of popular stories; mature without the sex tag is one of the very least popular tags for featured stories to bear.
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They peaked right before/after the start of season 4, which is also when Google trends found searches for MLP peaked. You'll notice there is also a big peak in new users at that time.
That being said, it seems to have more plateaued than anything.
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Well, people continued writing throughout the hiatus between the third and fourth seasons. The 4th season was pretty flat. Authors lost a bit of heart during the hiatus after the 4th season and then again when we found out just how long it was going to be.
It flattened back out to stable during the 5th season, but we didn't gain any of the loss back. Without the 5th season it would have just tracked down.
One thing of note though is the lack of true epics. We have had a small number, but it is far fewer than we had a couple of years ago.
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You made me go look at that, and apparently I somehow just passed Aquaman in terms of followers.
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True epics?
Do you mean like, pony novels?
I suspect that to some extent, people are reluctant to follow new "epics" given that things like Green are still ongoing and stuff like Composure never got finished at all. When you have the option of reading already completed works, why follow a new incomplete thing that there is no guarantee will ever get finished?
I also think a lot of folks have realized on the writing end that it is a lot of work to write something like that as well, and people are focusing more on short stories and novelette type works.
3315018 you can also search for authors by number of blog posts or published stories. I didn't hang out toward the top of the second page or the bottom of the first page in terms of number of total stories published
I'm curious about that huge spike of user registrations in Oct-Nov 2013.
You'll find something. I believe in you!
I'll keep complaining about the site statistics until I've got the #1 spot.
i.ytimg.com/vi/Iz_rVEubqBQ/maxresdefault.jpg
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It's mostly a matter of incentives.
When EqD was the only place that people read fanfiction, their model was setup to favour longer stories. ("Popular" posts, based entirely on page views, appeared in the sidebar, creating a feedback loop. Every update on a popular story was enough to push it back onto the sidebar.) Notably, Past Sins and Fallout: Equestria (two fairly middling stories) were almost permanently in the sidebar for their print run. Coincidentally, that era of the fandom had a lot more people writing long stories.
I don't think EqD's system was good, but it's important to recognise how authors respond to incentives. The number one thing most authors are looking out for is more eyeballs.
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I see. That's quite the feedback loop.
Clearly we need to go back in time and change the timeline so a different set of long stories ended up over in that sidebar, and everyone's touchstone stories are... I dunno.
Sometime else.
And people are like "My god, someone wrote a six hundred thousand word crossover with Fallout?"