unjapanologist | [research] Oh look, another Fanlib.

Fanfic.me appears to be a company that tries to coax people into posting fanfic on its site so it can market visitor eyeballs to advertisers.

watersword has a ton of details here.

In-depth analysis and mockery will have to happen after a good night's sleep, because right now my brain can't seem to get past how incredibly hideous that site design is. So much orange. Ugliest banner ever. Why. And I don't know if there are even any real people over there, the profile names of the fic authors aren't clickable and all the comments seem to have been made by Fanfic.me itself. Did they just harvest stories from FF.net and change the author names? I tried googling the first sentence of a couple of the fics, and they were all posted to FF.net or deviantART under different author names.

Regardless, this one looks like a really special train wreck. It's... kind of pathetically cute, the way they throw "fanfic" around as a keyword, as if it's a magic spell that will draw all the "fanfic" writers to their site. Look at the way they keep using it as a hashtag on their Twitter account. I almost feel sorry for them, they're so obviously ignorant and incompetent and doomed and unable to see what's coming their way.

EDIT of no, still not sleeping: There's a lot more discussion/sleuthing going on in

watersword's post, including

franzeska digging up a hilarious news article about Fanfic.me.

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I checked a couple of stories at random on fanfic.me. (Never seen so much het Supernatural fic in one place ever.) One was also archived at WWOMB and one on myfandoms.com, so I checked that site out.

If these are the same people as myfandoms.com, as the post you linked says, they've been around for quite a while. I wonder if this new domain is a re-branding, or meant to be a new site with more features. I hate to link to FanHistory Wiki, but that's where the info on myfandoms.com is.

http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/MyFandoms.com

Frankly, it looks like they've been quietly filling myfandoms with fic, mostly drawing from ff.net type people, for years. That site also has some active RP forums, but their blogs are full of spam.

But now they're suddenly SEOing it up with the new domain, trying to drive traffic via twitter, Facebook etc. Totally different MO. Buyout maybe?

Ah, interesting! Will check it all out tomorrow. No more brain right now. What a week :)

EDIT: never mind sleep. Hmmm, Jacky Abromitis seems to be featuring in both MyFandoms and Fanfic.me, and content of the twitter feeds of both are pretty much identical right now. The whole thing looks like this weird little ecosystem of interlinked crummy sites filled with the same (dummy?) accounts. Those RP forums seem to be full of posts by the same handful of people. No adds, blogs full of spam -doesn't look like any community has actually been active here, except for possibly those few RP'ers.

As you say, the fic offerings look identical to those on Fanfic.me. Same weird author names full of numbers, too. Do you have any idea if people actually posted on MyFandoms, or if it's mostly scraped works? I wasn't involved in online fandom around the time this one got created, so I don't have any direct memories of it being discussed anywhere.

I'm finding it hard to imagine why anyone would buy out MyFandoms, or why the same people would think that trying this MO might help them make actual money. But I have no idea what else they could be trying to do...

Edited 2011-10-01 17:36 (UTC)

I looked at SPN and SGA fic, fandoms where I stand a chance of recognizing names even in het/gen/ff.net circles. I didn't recognize any, but googling led me to an LJ for one person. I think perhaps they have been promoting themselves on ff.net forums and drawing from a completely different iteration of fandom than I'm (or most anyone else posting on DW) are familiar with.

I doubt their scraped, I'm assuming all accounts are real.

From the FH Wiki post, it would appear that they pre-date fanlib and have already been around the block on being conflated with that debacle. I'm taking them at their word that they are fans as well.

I hope you're right and there's been no scraping :( *crosses fingers*

Not so sure about the Fanfic.me people being fans, though. They don't bill themselves like that in this news article, and I can't manage to dig up anything fannish related to Jacky Abromitis. Just lots of stuff about her distance learning company.

quicky note--I commented on your post before seeing your comment here about the accounts!

Ah, confirmed - their about page talks about the stuff being ported from MyFandoms.

Oh, for pity's sake, not again. The list of other sites owned by the company is odd. Wasn't there a FanLib/L Word partnership? I wonder if any of the same people are involved.

Yeah, it looks like it. See facetofcathy's comment up above, and people are linking to stuff at watersword's post too.

Why do they keep trying this? Are they bored or something?

They keep trying it because the idea of a large volume of rapidly updating content and clicks tied to media phenomena existing without someone making money off it is anathema to their Facebook-era view of the internet. Additionally, I'm sure, there's a healthy dose of sexism and geek hierarchy at play, convincing them that the only reason fandom hasn't thus far been a money-maker is because fannish people are too stupid to know what they're sitting on.

Yes to all of that. But why do they not do any research at all?? It seems like such a massive waste of time, I really feel kind of sorry for them. Almost.

I can't say I feel sorry for any of them at this point, if only because of the patronizing angle these efforts are invariably pitched from. It's kind of funny that we live in an era of almost unprecedented market research, and yet the biggest guiding forces are based on things that research doesn't bear out but which everyone in the industry "knows." Things like, "girls and women can relate to male characters but men and boys can't relate to female characters," or "people won't see movies unless the leads are white," or "the 18-35 demographic hold the real spending power," or "women don't experience visual attraction."

A friend of mine in academia recently had an unpleasant run-in with a colleague who had decided he was going to be the first person to study fanfiction. There is a not-inconsiderable group of people who think so highly of their knowledge in their field that they believe if they haven't heard of something, it must not exist.

Yeah. This is... amazingly dumb. The only reason I feel sorry for them is that they seem to be such silly, stupid people. I hope they find help and get better.

And oh yes, the things everyone "knows". The first person to study fan fiction? What sort of research was he planning to do? I really, really want to know. And at what state his preparations were. If he's the kind of academic who thinks Wikipedia is junk and Google Scholar is something for those damn kids who don't remember having to do scholarschip without internet or databases and uphill both ways... Then yes, he might not have discovered any research about fan culture in his department library.

Linking and signal boosting and *headdesking*

Good grief, Charlie Brown!

THanks for the info!

[research] Oh look, another Fanlib.

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