Two weeks ago, I took a snapshot of entry counts for each tag on the fandoms page at Archive of Our Own, hoping to eventually get a sense of which fandoms were growing fastest. Comparing that data with the entry counts on the site today, I think it might be possible to understand which fandoms are growing most quickly.

Unfortunately, a simple count of how many times each fandom’s tag was used is going to be imperfect—maybe much more misleading than my BoardGameGeek reports. Evidently, AO3 tag counts can fluctuate quite a bit: their names can change; tags can reportedly be reclassified such that their new parent tags suddenly get credit for existing entries; and the archive accepts mass uploads of fanfic from old repositories / personal collections such that work written long ago can suddenly show up as if it were new.

Still, it’s something. I’ll start with the top 25 fandoms by a raw count of new entries appearing in the past two weeks:

Honestly, the most surprising items are things like Firefly, the tag count for which has likely been skewed by one of the factors I mentioned above. Only Detroit: Become Human pops out as the kind of fast-growing category I’m sure I’m looking for (though I have doubts about the game itself). So a raw count of new entries is probably not very helpful for discovering newly popular / fast-growing fandoms.

So here’s a list of every fandom that had more than 25 new entries in the past two weeks, that grew by more than 4.0%, and that had more existing entries two weeks ago than it has gained in the past two weeks (a criterion that will eliminate things that are really too new to judge; for example, assuming it has real growth potential, I’ll have to catch Detroit: Become Human next time, because it’s more important to weed out name changes and weed out percent changes that only seem large because the population is too small):

I’m not positive this is the best way to look at the data, but there sure are plenty of things here I’ve never heard of and would like to know more about.