I’ll get to the title line after first explaining what we’re talking about with LiveJournal stats. If you haven’t figured it out, we love stats at Fan History. We love them a lot. Stats can back up your gut feeling about what is going on in fandom. We’ve been tracking the size of fandom on FanFiction.Net, FanWorks.Org, FicWad, SkyHawke, FanFikion.De and Freedom of Speech for a couple of months and we’re addicted. It showed us that Twilight fandom had a small post movie release bump but it really took about two, three weeks for the fandom to explode. (And the numbers haven’t gone down since.)

Given this love, we wanted to get more stats. And we wanted our stats to come from LiveJournal and its clones because we’ve always been told that LiveJournal is a hub of fandom activity. How busy is the fandom? How active? What fandoms are more active than others? How do we measure the level of fandom activity on LiveJournal and its clones?

The method that was chose was to manually create a list of LJ comms based on fandoms. We chose manual because interests don’t really work. You could pick up icon communities dedicated to 100 fandoms where the fandom is unlikely to be represented regularly. We then built a list which we sorted by fandom, by language and by service. Our final list for LiveJournal included 3,092 fandoms. We couldn’t really make it much bigger because we needed to be able to update all these articles in a single day AND the bot would need to access each profile once a day to get the stats we were looking for. The stats pick up total posts, total comments, total members, total watchers and that information is put onto an article about the community in question. All the communities for a fandom are then added together and put on article which measures the total activity in a fandom based on our list for that fandom. Example: Harry Potter LiveJournal community size. After that’s done, those columns are then added together based on language for the community and we get a beautiful list like this list.

What’s interesting is that Twilight is hot on LiveJournal and it clones AND hot with various fan fiction archives. Harry Potter, second on fan fiction archives, is only 18th on LiveJournal. (This could be because our LiveJournal sample is missing the more active HP communities but I some how doubt it.) Naruto is third with fan fiction archives but 15th on LiveJournal. This could be because anime communities are much better represented elsewhere on sites like CrunchyRoll, AnimeNewsNetwork, anime specific blogging sites, etc.

When you get out of English, Twilight fandom is well, active but not always active. It was tops on our Finnish sample. It was 8th in our French sample. It was 7th in our Italian sample. It was tops in Spanish. For the other languages, we couldn’t find communities for Twilight to even be included. That’s the case for most fandoms: Non-English representation is tiny. The fandom language communities just aren’t there, even if the language is. (There are half a dozen Slovak communities but none are fandom specific.)

So that all out of the way, below are the top 100 fandoms on LiveJournal, based on our sample, for yesterday:

Fandom movers and shakers for LiveJournal on January 14, 2009

Rank	Fandom	Total Activity	Previous rank
1	Twilight	6665	1
2	Meta	1232	2
3	WWE	1077	25
4	House M.D.	951	3
5	Katekyo Hitman Reborn!	833	7
6	Gossip Girls	735	9
7	Doctor Who	727	4
8	How I Met Your Mother	473	6
9	Merlin	381	5
10	Jonas Brothers	322	13
11	Bones	300	48
12	Top Gear	278	45
13	Darker than Black	221	31
14	As the World Turns	219	18
15	Naruto	184	16
16	30 Seconds to Mars	180	44
17	30 Rock	168	14
18	Harry Potter	167	10
19	Hanson	165	84
20	One Tree Hill	162	124
21	Slayers	150	47
22	My Chemical Romance	134	75
23	New Kids on the Block	130	156
24	David Tennant	130	19
25	NCIS	129	24
26	Laurell K. Hamilton	125	37
27	Britney Spears	124	34
28	Anita Blake	123	36
29	Life on Mars	118	26
30	High School Musical	118	12
31	Ugly Betty	115	33
32	Avatar: The Last Airbender	115	79
33	Neil Patrick Harris	113	8
34	Mystery Science Theater 3000	113	54
35	Bleach	112	15
36	Manchester United	111	11
37	Sports fan fiction	107	42
38	Soccer fan fiction	107	43
39	Sailor Moon	98	28
40	Transformers	94	40
41	The Office (US)	93	23
42	Grey’s Anatomy	87	50
43	Star Trek	83	21
44	Prince of Tennis	81	109
45	Torchwood	76	17
46	Stargate SG-1	76	29
47	An Cafe	76	20
48	Ben 10	74	108
49	Gackt	73	72
50	Pokemon	71	74
51	Alice Nine	67	128
52	Law and Order: SVU	65	71
53	America’s Next Top Model	62	22
54	Lost	57	68
55	24	56	112
56	West Wing	55	80
57	The Sentinel	52	46
58	Vancouver Islanders	51	52
59	The Big Bang Theory	51	117
60	The Mentalist	48	73
61	Saiyuki	48	39
62	Bob Dylan	48	253
63	Fullmetal Alchemist	47	69
64	Ewan McGregor	46	51
65	Ace Attorney	45	119
66	the GazettE	44	56
67	Veronica Mars	44	91
68	U2	44	162
69	The Young and the Restless	44	306
70	CSI: Miami	44	111
71	Atlanta Braves	44	228
72	One Piece	43	38
73	L Word	43	67
74	Dir en grey	43	30
75	Futurama	42	703
76	CSI	42	64
77	iCarly	40	27
78	Kingdom Hearts	40	107
79	Batman	40	78
80	Speed Racer	39	92
81	Beverly Hills 90210	39	127
82	X-Files	37	85
83	Drake & Josh	37	58
84	Phantom of the Opera	36	209
85	Mad Men	36	59
86	Lord of the Rings	36	101
87	Hellsing	34	187
88	Dancing with the Stars	34	131
89	Backstreet Boys	34	183
90	The Late Late Show	33	96
91	Craig Ferguson	33	99
92	Inuyasha	32	141
93	Boston Red Sox	29	104
94	Princess Tutu	27	65
95	David Bowie	27	110
96	Bandom	27	88
97	Sonic: The Hedgehog	25	208
98	Whose Line is it Anyway	24	95
99	Supernatural	24	60
100	Pushing Daises	24	32