simple-ao3-stats

[simple-ao3-stats]

Step 7: OTP

Let's widen our net a little by removing the language, completion and word count filters. Here is a link to the resulting search: link

This gives us 45,520 fics. We can find the Top-10 relationships on the filter panel on the right again, and they look like this:

Jayce/Viktor (League of Legends) (703) Caitlyn/Vi (League of Legends) (482) Minor or Background Relationship(s) (444) Evan "Buck" Buckley/Eddie Diaz (9-1-1 TV) (442) Bakugou Katsuki/Midoriya Izuku (361) Sirius Black/Remus Lupin (327) Ekko/Jinx (League of Legends) (253) Castiel/Dean Winchester (211) Lucanis Dellamorte/Rook (198) No Romantic Relationship(s) (190)

Now, we all know that some fics in a ship's tag will only feature the ship somewhere in the background. It's particularly frustrating when you like a rarepair! It is also not very useful when you're trying to collect stats about ship popularity.

There is no perfect way to filter out such fics, but an imperfect way uses the additional string of characters in the Search within results field:

otp:true

Together with our date filter, it will look like this:

As you can see, they are only separated by a single space, without commas or any other symbols between them.

This search will now only include fics with exactly one ship tagged, reducing the total number to 23,637. That's quite a difference!

Of course, this method is imperfect because many fics do focus on multiple ships at once, and the otp:true search will exclude them.

Jayce/Viktor (League of Legends) (364) Evan "Buck" Buckley/Eddie Diaz (9-1-1 TV) (264) Neuvillette/Wriothesley (Genshin Impact) (182) Bakugou Katsuki/Midoriya Izuku (176) Caitlyn/Vi (League of Legends) (170) Castiel/Dean Winchester (164) Tartaglia | Childe/Zhongli (Genshin Impact) (147) No Romantic Relationship(s) (127) Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter (108) Evan "Buck" Buckley/Tommy Kinard (105)

[simple-ao3-stats]

Step 5: Looking at the Data

The search we did in Step 4 gives us the following results:

1 - 20 of 347 Works found in Teen And Up Audiences

Now we can look at what the basic stats for our search, once again by looking at the filters panel on the right. The neat thing about the filters is that they will always show you the top 10 tags in your search results. For example, if we click on Relationships to unroll the list, we will see the following numbers:

Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski (16) Evan "Buck" Buckley/Eddie Diaz (9-1-1 TV) (9) Spike/Buffy Summers (4) Matsuoka Rin/Nanase Haruka (4) Tadej Pogačar/Jonas Vingegaard (4) Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter (3) Jack Harkness/Ianto Jones (3) Stephanie Brown/Jason Todd (3) Sabrina Spellman/Mary Wardwell | Madam Satan | Lilith (3) Christine Chapel/La'an Noonien-Singh (3)

This means that among the Dec-2024 drabbles, 16 works were tagged with Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski, 9 with Evan "Buck" Buckley/Eddie Diaz (9-1-1 TV) and so on. (Even if the fic writer spelled the ship name differently, it will be included in the number thanks to the lovely tag wranglers!)

And there you go! The Top-10 ships in our (extremely specific) search are listed above, with the number of works and everything.

Keep in mind that a fic can be tagged with multiple ships, so adding these numbers together might give you a total that is bigger than 347.

[simple-ao3-stats]

Step 4: Setting Other Restrictions

Of course, you can choose to limit your search in other ways. For example, you can choose to exclude crossovers or only look at works marked "Complete":

You can also limit your search to a particular language, or only look at works with a particular wordcount. In the screenshot above, we are looking only for drabbles (exactly 100 words) in English, created in December 2024, excluding crossovers and incomplete works.

[simple-ao3-stats]

Step 3: Getting Stats for a Time Period

To make it simple, this tutorial will only look at works tagged with Teen Audiences and Up rating, but this will work on any of the 5 pages discussed in Step 2.

Any work on AO3 has two dates attached to it. One is Date Updated, which you can find on the filters panel. The filters panel is located on the right of any filterable page.

If you click on the From and To fields, a calendar pops up that allows you to pick any dates to limit your time period.

The other date attached to every work is known as created_at, and this one is just a tiny bit trickier. In order to limit your search to works created in a specific time period, you will have to use the Search within results field, which you can find right between the Date Updated and Language fields.

In the field, you will need to enter exactly the following string of characters – obviously, adjusting the dates as you like!

created_at:["2024-01-01" TO "2024-12-31"]

The case of each character is important here, and also don't forget the quotation marks around the dates! The dates themselves have to be formatted like this: YYYY-MM-DD, with the year going first (all four digits), then the month (always two digits) and then the day (also two digits), separated by simple dashes.

For a longfic, the two dates may differ significantly, while for one-shot they might be exactly the same. You can choose which date you are more interested in, or even filter your search by both of them.

[simple-ao3-stats]

Step 2: Getting at All the Works

To get the full picture, you need an easy way to view all the works available on the archive. There is, however, no button to show you all works at once. Instead, you can assemble the full picture by browsing the Rating tags:

General Audiences

Teen and Up Audiences

Mature

Explicit

Not Rated

Because any work on AO3 can only ever be tagged with one rating, these 5 links won't have any overlap. At the same time, a work can't have no rating tag whatsoever, meaning that the these 5 links cover everything posted on the archive.

The only exceptions are drafts and works in hidden collections which are not visible to anyone except their creators.

[simple-ao3-stats]

Step 1: Get Your AO3 Account!

You don't need a bot or any sort of automation to collect these stats! Ideally, you do need an ao3 account, which you can get here:

https://archiveofourown.org/invite_requests

The "invite" process is fully automated - you just need to enter your email address to join the waiting list. How long you have to wait depends entirely on how many other people are trying to get in at the same time. For example, as of now the site says:

There are currently 113725 people on the waiting list. We are sending out 8000 invitations per day.

113725 / 8000 = 14.215625, which is just a smidge over 2 weeks.

Of course you can collect some stats without an account, as the site is fully usable in guest mode. You just won't be able to see any "private" works, which are only visible to logged-in users.