[Waits for surprise]
[Nobody is surprised]
So! I have an index of every PPC story that a) was posted by and b) still existed by June 2020. There's no reason it couldn't go further; that's just when I did the archiving. The early stuff isn't entirely accurately dated, because there was a lot of detective work involved, but after 2008 it's mostly based directly on Board posts.
The index also includes author names - or rather attributions. Two authors who wrote separately, but also had a cowrite, will appear as three entries ("Jay", "Acacia", "Jay & Acacia"). I don't think this is a serious problem, but for transparency.
Note: I have excluded anything tagged "Fanfic Land" or "FanficWorld" from this data.
I also have this recent graph of Board activity. It's a bit approximate, but I can convert it into average threads per day easily enough; a very rough check we did in the same thread shows that thread count and total post count are strongly correlated.
Put it all together, multiply the threads-per-day by 5 to get them on the same scale, and shift the story count to a second Y axis so we can line it all up:
Story count and author count are strongly correlated. That's good! It means the PPC has never been supported by a couple of authors writing profusely - the more people we have, the more we write.
The exception is in 2002-2006, when it looks like we had a whole bunch of authors who didn't really do much. I would guess there were a lot of one-off stories in there.
Board activity is very rough data, but it looks like it doesn't track with actual PPC content, at least generally. The big 2011 spike is entirely missing from the Board activity; that was more writing without more posts.
Again, the exception... 2015 was a spike for everything, followed by a sharp decline for everything. The writing spike in 2018 didn't affect the Board, and everything dropped back down again after that.
More data is needed. ^_^ Specifically, the massive Board dropoff from the other post started in 2020, so we don't have the data to know if it was reflected in the story count. At some point I'll work through the last 40 pages or so of the Board and update the index, but not right now.
Bonus graph: stories broken down by both year and month:
Um... yeah, that 2011 spike is a Badfic Games that didn't get properly excluded. Oh well!
hS