#ao3 demographics survey

[ao3demographicssurvey2024]

In the AO3 Demographics Survey 2024 - an unofficial demographics survey of 16,131 AO3 users - 68% of respondents identified as solely white, including 68% of those living in North or Central America.

To see more analysis, including a discussion of issues we identified with the phrasing of this question, please view the full results on AO3.

[centrumlumina]

I used some of your census data in my Dissertation which was many many moons ago, and I was looking it up recently and realised that... it's been 10 years. Have you considered running a census again?

I am actually working on a 10 year anniversary survey! If you would be interested in helping out with the project, you can join the Discord (I'll leave an invite link in the notes) or follow the project Tumblr at @ao3demographicssurvey2023

[ellekhen]

The results are in!

Thank you so much to everyone who answered this survey last week! I loved getting more insight into who's been reading and following my work, (and putting this together was pretty fun too. :D)

A couple of takeaways:

To all the ace folks: Well, I'm going to assume you're here for the angst and plot. Otherwise, I hope y'all haven't minded the smut! ^_^;

Shout out to the guys who've been enjoying my fics! I'll be honest, as someone who's been primarily writing mlm, it's tremendously validating to know you're here!

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by the wide distribution of responses! All in all, no matter how you identify, I'm truly honored to know that you've all been enjoying this lil' Churchstarion universe.

As always, thank you so much for reading! I look forward to sharing more of these stories with you as our adventure goes on together. ❤️

(Not sure how readable the image is, so here's a text-only translation below the fold:)

ElleKhen's Self-Reported Reader Demographics

RESPONSES (n=26)

Female - Asexual/Aromantic/Demisexual: 26.9% Female - Straight/Heterosexual: 15.4% Male - Bisexual/Pansexual/Queer: 15.4% Female - Bisexual/Pansexual/Queer: 11.5% Male - Gay/Homosexual: 7.7% Non-binary/Gender-queer - Bisexual/Pansexual/Queer: 7.7% Non-binary/Gender-queer - Asexual/Aromantic/Demisexual: 7.7% Female - Lesbian/Sapphic: 3.8% Non-binary/Gender-queer - Lesbian/Sapphic: 3.8%

NO DATA: Non-binary/Gender-queer - Gay/Homosexual, Male - Asexual/Aromantic/Demisexual, Male - Straight/Heterosexual

---

BREAKDOWN BY GENDER

FEMALE (n=15) Asexual/Aromantic/Demisexual: 46.6% Straight/Heterosexual: 26.6% Bisexual/Pansexual/Queer: 20% Lesbian/Sapphic: 6.6%

NON-BINARY (n=5) Bisexual/Pansexual/Queer: 40.0% Asexual/Aromantic/Demisexual: 40.0% Lesbian/Sapphic: 20.0%

MALE (n=6) Bisexual/Pansexual/Queer: 66.6% Gay/Homosexual: 33.3%

[elumish]

I was looking at the newest release of AO3 Demographic Survey results, which were about race, and something struck me.

Unsurprisingly, the numbers show that this part of fandom is really, really white (78.8% answered white re: their race, with 68.1% giving it as their sole answer). Latino/a/e was the next highest, at 7.1%/3.4% as sole answer.

Black, in comparison, was at 3.0%/1.8% as sole answer.

These numbers are broadly comparable to previous surveys (you can see a brief discussion of the comparison in the link).

When looking at these numbers, there are two main explanations, and both of them are notable in slightly different ways.

First, that fandom (at least defined as people who used AO3) really is this white. I find this particularly notable given the regular framing of fandom and AO3 as havens for marginalized people. We see in other results from this survey that there are relatively high proportions of queer people and women in fandom, but this indicates that fandom is primarily welcoming of and home to marginalized people so long as they are white rather than all kinds of marginalized people.

The second explanation, as I see it, is that fandom surveys consistently reflect the same sampling errors in both directionality and degree, which would indicate that there are parallel or at least broadly separate fandom spaces (outside of AO3), one of which is primarily white and one (or more) of which is less so. Basically, if survyes keep getting sampling wrong in the same way over the course of over a decade, it's because the places where the sample is being drawn from are consistently more white than fandom as a whole.

My instinct is to say that the first explanation is more correct, and that the overrepresentation of white people compared to the overall population is reflective of who participates in fandom rather than simply where survey links are being shared.

Either way, an interesting finding.

[coiled-dragon]

Okay because im curious after seeing a persons tags on the Ao3 Demographic survey....

Choose whatever label vibes with you, for the sake of not having 20 options I did simplify it to Trans, Not Trans, or Questioning/Unsure. As an umbrella, Transgender simply means someone whose Gender Identity differs from their assigned gender, but I know Intersex, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, etc people sometimes call themselves Trans, and sometimes dont feel the label applies to them. Just go with what you prefer to use!

Please Reblog to get a decent sample size!

[olderthannetfic]

In one of the asks about shoddy methodology for fandom statistics, you have made a side eyed comment a recent fandom survey and if it's the one I'm thinking about- yeah it's bad.

I'm not a prolific fanfic writers, so even though m/m fics have the highest percentage in my body of works (like 2 out of all 5 of them lol), I wouldn't say I *frequently* post m/m fics. Same goes with the ratings. Genres and tags (or more accurately, *tropes*) are not the same things and I don't like how the survey conflates them. The selection of genres look like they pull it out of fanfiction dot net. The tropes are so limiting. There are several selections for ""fluffy"" AUs- highschool AU, coffee shop AU, soulmate AU, but no killer/assassin AU? No camboy AU? No goddam casefic??? Crackfic gets to be one of the choices and there isn't an option for the incredibly ubiquitous role reversal AU???

And how am I supposed to answer the question "How much do you enjoy works focused on the following types of relationships on AO3?" I ship the characters because I like their dynamic, not because they are gay or lesbian or whatever. Most m/m fics bore me, even if those are the majority of fanfics I read. My enjoyment of a fic doesn't correlate to whether it's rated Explicit or has found family tagged on it.

All in all, I found that demographic survey sure made some sweeping assumptions about AO3 users, and I don't think its result will be meaningful in any way :/

--

It also, I am told, ignored all of the preliminary research where people got to respond ahead of time and try to improve the questions.

Concerns were raised... and then ignored.

[princehendir]

"Most of the people in fandom are attracted to men so that's why there's such a focus on male characters" is one of those arguments that makes a lot of simple straightforward sense until you start thinking about it like, at all. Fandom demographic surveys (e.g. for ao3's userbase, surveys & polls that get passed around among shippers for very popular pairings) generally point to queer women being the second largest demographic, very close after straight women. So like, what gives?

[broomsticks]

wolfstar fandom survey results pt. 1/many: demographics of survey respondents

in winter 2022 the big wolfstar server decided we were curious about the fandom and decided to put together a survey. from early Oct to early Nov 2022 it got 400+ responses to a bunch of questions from age to house sorting to gender, general continental location, 'Marauder you most relate to,' favorite non-wolfstar ship, fic, and tropes. the whole thing is a monster to analyze and can probably keep my little nerd face busy for years lmao, but I'll be attacking it in small bites so have some results as I make them!

also: i was not involved in the design of this survey beyond 'server member' and did not have any input into which questions were asked and how!

i also did not keep track of where & how this survey was publicized, i genuinely have no idea and can only make guesses from seeing the results.

i also also, as of time of writing, have no plans to rerun this survey on any sort of regular basis! with that in mind, thoughts and comments are welcome!

• • •

first things first: a general overview of respondents:

The largest category of respondents was 25+, with 80 respondents from the smallest bucket of age 10-17.

60% of respondents answered "0-5 years" to the question "How long have you been in the Wolfstar fandom?". The remaining 40% was equally split between the other two options "5-10 years" and "10+ years."

& the vast majority of respondents lived in North America or Europe.

This global distribution generallyyyy holds true across ages and length of time in fandom.

NA fans make up a majority of both the oldest and longest-participating categories. there's interestingly an increase in European and Asian fans in the very youngest parts of fandom, and an Oceania peak in the intermediate 5-10y and age 18-24 buckets.

Unsurprisingly, age and length of time in fandom are related. Passes the sanity check too (no six-year-olds admitting to reading fic!), which is a good sign for this data!

• • •

>96% of respondents read fic primarily on AO3, 2.5% on Wattpad and 1% on FFN. Data not shown bc of post image limit.

More detailed analysis of this data specifically is going to be a bit complicated because multiple selections were allowed (respondents picked 1.65 options on average) if anyone has tips or tools for how to analyze this, lmk!!!

• • •

With how much age and fandom length correlate, it's not surprising that they're largely similar (few Slytherins in young fandom! and the opposite for Gryffindor in older fandom!) but it was interesting to see that both these trends have more to do with fandom length of time than chronological age.

[melodioustear]

Fanfic & Mental Illness Survey Responses 1 - Demographics

As I've said elsewhere, the bulk of my analysis of the survey will focus on the qualitative questions - those are the ones that are most relevant to my thesis. But given the intersectionality of both my thesis and fandom in general, it's also super interesting to look at the demographics.

So today both for your interest and my benefit, I'm going to go through the demographics questions and chat about each of them in turn, especially (but not purely) with reference to what it could mean for my research.

For the purposes of this initial post I am just using the infographics generated by Google Forms - I'm working on putting together better ones which I will share later on.

Enjoy!

Q1: Do you experience or have you ever experienced any kind of mental illness or similar? 

It is unsurprising that in a survey about mental illness, most people who completed it have experienced it. 443 of the 488 respondents answered yes to this question for a total percentage of 90.8%. There's not a ton of fandom demographics out there on mental illness, so we can't quite know what this is like in comparison to the general fandom population (shoutout to @ao3demographicssurvey2023 for the data we will hopefully have soon!) - but it's reasonable to presume these figures are higher than normal given the topic of the survey.

Q2: Do you have any kind of disability, chronic illness or similar?

This is the first select all that apply question, so this chart is a little more complex to read. To just look at disabled vs non-disabled, we can see that 20.5% declare themselves to be non-disabled, with the remaining 79.5% being disabled. The %s we can then see in this chart by the disability types are a % of the total.

We do have some general disability demographics, though they are also from more niche surveys, like Renée Nielsen's 2021 survey on Whump which puts disability % as only 16.9%. However it's important to note that Nielsen queried neurodivergency separately, and saw 46.3% identifying as neurodivergent. So when you take that into account these figures aren't quite as radically dissimilar as they might otherwise appear. (Obviously some people in Nielsen's survey will have said they are both ND and disabled so this isn't exact, but it's a general idea).

As someone who has a chronic pain condition, it was very interesting to me that so many people identified with that. I hadn't originally intended to list chronic pain separately (as it's so often caused by something else, like a physical disability or chronic illness) - but in discussion with people on the Discord for the above mentioned AO3 Census, decided to do so, and I'm very glad I did. I'm super interested to see what these figures come out as for the 2023 Census.

Q3: If you experience mental illness, do you consider your mental illness to be a disability? 

Firstly a shoutout to my past self for somehow not ticking 'required' on this question and allowing two people not to complete it. Oh well. It is likely they fall into the "I do not experience" category anyway, or they are people who prefer not to disclose.

So, this question was one I was most excited about, because it's such an interesting thing as someone who's approaching mental illness at least in part from a disability studies perspective. One of the critiques of disability studies is that mental illness is often either an afterthought or not considered at all. (In her incredible book black madness :: mad blackness, Pickens points out that disability studies has inherited some very ableist assumptions of 'mind', calling back to the awful Cartesian duality).

Therefore it's not really surprising that so many people have complex feelings around whether their mental illness is a disability or not - especially with a high % of neurodiverse people. Whilst I included neurodiversity in the disabiility question and not separately, many people do not prefer to consider their neurodiversity to be a disability.

The question of whether mental illness and/or neurodivergence are disabilities is a very loaded, very personal thing, and I feel super strongly that we should all use the terminology that we prefer for our experiences - especially in a culture where the terminology is so highly medicalised, pathologised and curated by bias and marginalisation - but we're not here for my anti-DSM rant today.

I think this question really highlights that complexity and it's that ability to rest in vagueness and uncertainty that characterises Mad Studies for me, and is super interesting as a result.

Q3: How old are you?

Yes, the legend for this one is so long it had to go over into two images.

Here's the fun thing about this question - you can see fandom aging. In the 2013 AO3 Census, the biggest categories were 19-21 at 23%, 22-24 at 20%, and 25-29 at 19%. In this survey, we have 30-34 at 23%, 25-29 at 20.3%, and 35-39 at 16.6%. I'm very interested to see what the 2023 Census figures come out as and whether they display this trend of the dominant age group shifting upwards.

Having gone through a lot of work to be allowed to survey people 13 years and older, it was also notable to me that only 2 people aged 13-15, and 14 people aged 16-18 responded. This may well be a product of where and how I shared the survey, as well as the age shift in general, which is why I suspect we need a comparison like the Census to see the difference.

Q4: Which geographic region best describes your current place of residence?

No surprises here, I'm a European person who shared the survey only in English and on Anglocentric platforms - the more influential people and groups that shared the survey were also strongly US-centric.

Having said that it was lovely to see we got some representation from all of the options, even if only a few from some.

Q5: What is your race? Select all that apply.

I'll be honest, this is one of the first demographics that disappointed me. Whilst I cannot of course fully control the survey's reach once it's on social media, I'd hoped to see a more representative group from a racial perspective.

There's a huge intersection with mental illness and race. BIPOC are not just more likely to experience mental distress, they are also more likely to have one or more of the other factors that make you more likely to experience it - such as poverty or housing insecurity. So it's definitely a weakness of this survey that such a huge % of respondents were white.

I do wonder whether it has anything to do with the ongoing racism present in the AO3, and on social media in general - whether that's made people less inclined to engage with fandom spaces that might harm them - but it may equally just be that I am white, my personal and professional circles are predominantly white, and thus those circles are more likely to have the same white bias.

Some of it will likely be language barriers too, but when you have no funding it's basically impossible to conduct this kind of research across languages.

I hope that future research can be conducted to properly elevate BIPOC voices and make sure their perspectives on fandom and mental illness are heard too.

Q6: Do you identify as any of the following [queer identities]?

This was an optional question, so bear in mind the %s here will be skewed. This is one of those situations where my lack of experience came into play - if I was doing it now, with the wisdom of having started to want to analyse things, I would definitely have made all questions mandatory and always had a n/a option.

Nonetheless we can see here the usual strong weighting towards queer identity in fandom. I was especially delighted to get so many trans perspectives, which as we'll see in the next question included a really diverse selection of gender identities.

Something my supervisor encouraged me towards in my previous supervision was to look at the queer studies work in fandom and consider how that overlaps with my work. I have a strong background in gender studies and that's evolved into a love for queer theory and especially trans theory. Whilst I'm cis myself, trans theory has huge overlap with disability theory, especially in terms of self-identity and the need to constantly come out or reaffirm/redefine your disability.

Q7: What is your gender identity?

This was another select all that apply question and it is our first question that allowed write-in answers. This means this graph is a bit messy but as you can see people listed personal gender labels (some of which cross over with the given categories) as well as some longer reflections on their gender identity.

The two cut off, longer write-in questions were "I do not label but present masc" and "I am still discovering and questioning myself but this is how, for now, I identify as" - this second respondent obviously gave other options too.

As mentioned above I'm really delighted we got so many gender diverse responses. Being of a marginalised gender is also likely to lead to experience of mental distress (you will have noticed by now that all kinds of marginalisation do, goodness me, I wonder why) so it's great to have these perspectives included.

Q8 & Q9: What is your sexual orientation and what is your romantic orientation?

I've included these together so you can see them side-by-side as I think that's very interesting. Like before these are select all that apply questions with write-in options.

Longer write ins for sexual orientation were: - I don't distinguish between sexual and romantic orientation for myself. [a more specific version of the given I do not label] - Like before, I am still learning and questioning myself, but for now this is what I'm sure of about my sexual orientation. - Somewhere between demisexual and whatever the opposite of asexual is, like 3/4sexual?

And longer write-ins for romantic orientation were: - And once again, I'm questioning myself, still learning, but I think what I marked fits well enough for now, learning myself has been kind of chaotic

Shoutout to the person who has clearly gone on a journey with learning themselves lately and has given write-ins for all of these last few. I hope you keep your wonderful open-mind and insight into yourself!

Nothing here is surprising - we all know that fandom is heavily queer leaning, and it's not surprising that so many people identified as some form of queer. So whilst marginalised sexuality is also commonly alongside mental distress, I don't think for a fandom survey this will make as huge a difference, since fandom is so queer as it is.

Q10: Which religious or spiritual traditions do you believe? These options include all denominations.

Now this is where these graphs start to get really messy.

I'd first like to give another shoutout to the AO3 Census team who recommended including Folk Religion or Spirituality and Modern Paganism or Wicca, as these were things they had as common write-in responses in the 2013 Census. We can definitely see here that it's well represented too.

This is also a select all, so many of the write-in options (which I won't list this time as there's so many) were people clarifying exactly what their selections meant - such as saying I'm not sure so I picked X. I will say my favourite was "I honestly could not tell you. I've got schrodinger's religion at this point", because I think many of us have been there.

A couple of people did note that they were culturally affiliated with a religion even if they didn't believe.

Summary

And that's it for the biodata/demographics questions!

I apologise for the infographics not being amazing, this is as I've mentioned elsewhere my first time working on a project like this and whilst my graduate school offers access to software and training, it's still not something that I've got tons of experience in as a humanities scholar. With that said, I've loved the challenge and I'm very excited to get into coding the long-form responses.

What I've come away with is very much mixed - it does highlight the weaknesses of doing a specialised survey like this, and of only being really able to get it out there via social media (which means I've inherited the racial and geographic biases of my circles especially). That said I'm so happy we have so many disabilities represented, and that we have any disability data about fandom at all, even if it may not be fully representative of fandom as a whole.

I'll be doing a post next week looking at the quantitative questions around fanfiction practices, so make sure to follow and keep an eye out for that if you're interested!

[praetorqueenreyna]

Man, I fucking love creating surveys just to ignore the results and criticism because they don’t match my personal opinions and biases! Don’t you? Oh wait, I don’t need to ask, I can see from the many dismissals of valid criticisms in your posts that you do too! Fuck yeah!

You're feeling SO good about this, aren't you. You really showed me, the lesbophobic hate witch haunting the ACOTAR fandom. So fine, I guess I WILL keep having the same conversation. Also btw, taking my survey multiple times to suggest "any wlw ship" and accusing me of homophobia is not the slay you think it is.

Not to absolutely BLOW your mind, but the ships listed in the survey are the most popular ships in the fandom. If I tried to include every single rarepair, each question would have 100 options, and the survey would be unusable. And, also not to freak you out too much, but the core demographic of this fandom is straight women, who prefer straight ships.

Here are the stats so far for the "favorite ship" question.

20% is Feysand, 18.5% is Nessian, 13.3% is Elucien, and the pink and light blue on the left are Neris and Elriel.

You see that lil highlighted section at the top? The pink one? That's Emorie. One person has voted for it as their favorite ship. It's slightly more common as a second and third favorite ship (about 10 people have voted for it in each category). And that's for THE most popular wlw ship. There have been maybe one or two suggestions for other wlw ships, each with only 1 vote. So maybe my "personal bias" that this fandom is heterosexual and only ships the straight ships has been somewhat validated. To add wlw ships to this list that nobody is going to pick would be virtue signaling, just as you feeling righteously angry at ME over this fandom ignoring wlw ships is useless virtue signalling.

I'm in the main ACOTAR tag almost every day. I see the content that is being made. This fandom does not make content for wlw ships. I'm not exactly sure how that's MY fault. I'm not adding ships to "be inclusive," I'm doing it to collect accurate data for this fandom.

Hmm, well, nobody can say I don't do my research. Let's check out AO3 for those super popular wlw ships!

Weird. Well why I don't I check out YOUR AO3, @ablogofsapphicpanic? Surely you have been churning out wlw fics left and right, since you've seen fit to throw such a stink about this.

Oop, what's this? Only the straight canon ships? Thus confirming everything that I've been saying? Weird.

Also btw, when you take the survey, it tells me what time each submission was entered, so I can tell that the ones bitching about wlw ships and claiming I hate women submitted 2 minutes apart are from you. Anyway, have fun in the "other" category with the tamlin stans!

[lamardeuse]

uh...so what is up with this AO3 demographics survey that isn't affiliated with the AO3, claims to be a statistical survey but is run by someone with no background in sociology or statistics, and claims to be created to provide source material for future researchers but has no plan in their faq for how that survey will be archived or made accessible? judging by the feedback they've posted, it sounds like their "race/ethnicity" question is a hot mess as well. Anyone got any good info on this?

[ao3demographicssurvey2024]

Our first post discussing the AO3 Demographic Survey 2024's results is now up! Click here to read about the survey's sample and some of the inherent limitations of the resulting data.

And make sure you subscribe to the AO3 series or follow this Tumblr to keep up to date as we begin to release our results!

[gay-otlc]

Keepblr Wrapped 2022

Stats

note: numbers might not be 100% accurate

17 drawings of Fíntan in the definitely canon Neverseen uniform (likely more but tumblr search function sucks so 17 is the amount I found)

528 works published or updated on ao3

-230 ass of Fintan

69 genders transed

420 bowls of Pinterest soup

80085 cursed posts made

A fuck ton of absolute chaos

Year In Review

Most of the world started 2022 by praying this year wouldn’t be as bad as the last two. I started 2022 by being a math gay and posting the results of a survey on the KOTLC tumblr fandom’s gender and sexuality demographics. In conclusion, keepblr is very queer, which we probably didn’t need an official survey to prove.

We celebrated Valentine’s Day by coming up with keeper themed pickup lines, including but not limited to “I hope your mind isn’t as impenetrable as the rest of you” (shoutout to Achilles for that one). Then the Stellarlune cover dropped, and the sapphics of keepblr were all really normal about all the pretty girls on the cover. In honor of Maruca on the cover, Swan dedicated the entirety of March to her.

Other people in the KOTLC fandom have discourse about Sokeefe vs Sophitz. We don’t do that here. We have discourse about the size of Fintan’s ass. The discourse started in May, but Fin continues to deny the (true) accusations that his ass is flat.

As previously mentioned, keepblr is very queer, and we somehow got even gayer when pride month rolled around. Alden and Quinlin had their no homo wedding, but the rest of us were proudly yes homo.

In August, the (in)famous stripper Neverseen uniform post reached 500 notes, and we celebrated by drawing fanart. Unfortunately, some members of the instagram fandom were upset about this, and we had a bit of a war between the platforms, but eventually that died down.

As the release of Stellarlune approached, Arjun decided to redesign the book covers. Marketing KOTLC as a ya tiktok sensation. Using canva. The result was… memorable.

In October, the KOTLC series turned ten years old, and Tobi hosted a month of prompts and events to celebrate.

After years of waiting, Stellarlune was published! This book gave the fandom many great things, like unhinged gardener Fíntan and Prentice pagetime, but it also brought some aggressive Fitz-bashers onto tumblr. They have since been added to Fin’s soup, but not before one of them could send Roisin the iconic “Just because you’re gay doesnt mean Sophie is!!!” ask.

Keepblr’s 2022 will soon end with a fandom-wide secret Santa, that I should probably be working on now instead of writing the year in review. Oops. Anyway, thank you to keepblr for making 2022 slightly more bearable and a lot of fun, and I hope we cause just as much shenanigans in 2023.

[jalopeura]

curious abt finnish being in the top 20 languages on ao3 according to that recent demographic survey and i went looking at finnish language fanfics and, well

kuka ikiinä teistä onkaan tämän sort-by-kudos-filtterin ensimmäisellä sivulla esiintyvän tekeleen takana, nostan sulle hattua

[elumish]

Re AO3 race data: England and Wales are 82% white according to the 2021 census, and I think most European countries will be similar or even higher. I’m definitely not saying there isn’t racism in fandom, but just something to bear in mind, because I think a lot of AO3 users probably are European.

Sure!

The survey results do give a breakdown of sults of "white" responses by continent, which indicates that roughly 55% (probably a bit more, my math is lazy) of the total survey respondents are from North or Central America and roughly 30% are from Europe, so a lot are European, but 1) Europe is not made up of only England and Wales, and 2) far more respondents are from N./Central America than Europe.

The results also give some census data from a number of countries, including the U.S., which was 57.8% non-Hispanic white in the 2020 census (almost 10 percentage points lower than the proportion who answered only "white" for N./Central America). Canada was 69.8% white in their 2021 census, so that's a bit higher than the N./Central American percentage--so, to your point, it's a mix.

On the other hand, to my point, there are some groups we see extremely underrepresentated in the surveys relative to their overall population in the world. Black, as I mentioned, was at 3.0% (1.8% answered only Black)--this is far below the ~14% of the American population that is Black and even below the 4.2% of English population that is Black (if we're worried about the English demographics as a point of comparison).

The other part of my point was about how fandom often perceives itself as being particularly welcoming of marginalized people, with the high proportion of women and queer people in fandom. Even if we assume white people are perfectly representative of the overall geographic distribution of fandom, that still illustrates a disparity between the "welcome" (illustrated by relative overrepresentation) of white marginalized people in fandom and the "welcome" of non-white marginalized people in fandom.

[ao3survey22]

AO3 Demographics Survey **RESULTS**

Hi all-

About a year ago, I posted here looking for fans to participate in a survey that I was running about AO3 user demographics. We finally got the results out in a published format, check them out! We'll be following up with a more in-depth academic article in the future, but we wanted to get this out the door first. Enjoy! https://www.flowjournal.org/2023/02/fan-demographics-on-ao3/