Zarpaulus

Writer of sci-fi and horror

Underemployed biologist and creator of the Para-Imperium setting. Currently writing the webcomic "Joanna: Ghost Hunter."

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in reply to @fwankie's post:

I'd argue that a lot of people just got on the hype train in the beginning, but the fandom itself isn't short-lived and is still going strong to this day. Con graphs also aren't a good way to chart the popularity of a fandom, the 2019 BronyCon got ~10k people because they couldn't fit more in the venue, and I'd guess the same is true for the furry conventions capping out at certain counts. Convention-goers are also the minority of people in both fandoms.

It's actually kind of hard to get simple data (eg google trends) for the pony fandom, because a lot of people don't use the term "brony" and just looking up "pony" or "mlp" gives a lot of misleading results.

One better proxy for fandom size might be the amount of fanworks - art, stories, music (mlp fandom especially early on has a lot more of that than furry I feel) - created in a given time frame. Shouldn't be hard to look up say on derpibooru the number of images (excluding screencaps etc) uploaded for each year or each month.

Convention attendance is a good enough measure here I think, it's constrained by the same things that furry cons and BLFC is the only one with even close to the same growth curve (also constrained by its venue)