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There are One billion words of My Little Pony fanfiction hosted on FiMfiction.net.

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Well, more specifically, 1,019,229,319, but hey, who’s counting, right?

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That’s a lot of fanfic.

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Let’s just say that you have a friend made it his goal in life to read ALL the My Little Pony fanfiction.

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He reads for 12 hours a day, every day, at the average adult pace of 300 words per minute.  

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It'll take him thirteen years to read all the stories written on FiMfiction

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But wait, there is over a million words of fanfic uploaded each day.

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That’s five times the amount of words he is even capable of reading.

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Basically, unless the fandom stops producing fanfic, he will never, ever read everything.

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So your friend decides to follow Sturgeon’s law.

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He’s going to avoid the incomplete, on hiatus, or cancelled fics, and only read the top 10% of “good” fanfic.

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But that’s still over 100,000,000 words. And if he reads at the normal pace… 

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that’s a year and three months that he will be reading fanfic. 

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So let’s not follow sturgeon’s Law.  

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Scratch that. 

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Let’s follow Sturgeon’s law… twice. 

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Let’s only read the top 1% of fanfic. 

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At max speed… about 5 days. Leisurely… about a month.

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And that's good fanfic.

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That's— that's

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that's the good stuff

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And now that we’ve decided how much is conceivable to read. Let’s get to it.

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The first story will most likely be categorized as an “Adventure.”

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It’s the most popular category for fanfiction. 

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The most "normal" story on FiMfiction would be a Dark, Romantic-Comedy Adventure 

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starring Twilight Sparkle, Princess Celestia and Rainbow Dash 

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that has 14 likes, 3 dislikes and 349 views.

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Actually we’ll probably skip that story, because popularity skews to the outliers of the fanfic world.

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But even by the end of the month, your friend will find that there are other stories that pique his interest

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and that his "read later" list just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

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These stories are just too good to stop. 

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It’s unreal that there are stories that could be this good coming out of nowhere. 

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But these words don’t just come out of nowhere.

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That one billion represents the sum total of the work of over 30,000 authors.

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Let’s just say for a moment that every writer on FiMfic is just a writing machine

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that can churn out words at the rate of… about 2000 words a day. 

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So a billion words represents at least 1,400 years of work.

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Anyone in the top 10% of words written has spent at least forty days slaving over keyboard

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trying to figure out the right words to say.

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But this is an extreme stretch when you consider that a lot of these authors are writing for fun for the first time.

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This is their first foray into the world of actually creating something on their own.

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And yet, enough people have gone out of their comfort zone and spent hours of their time to write stories, for us.

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That’s time they were somehow able to peel themselves away from the rest of the internet,

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and the distractions of life to actually write stories.

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It says something for how amazing a show MLP can be that it can inspire this much creativity.

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If you like spreadsheets, check out the bottom for a bunch of data you can play around with.

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All the statistics in this video comes from scraping through a bunch of metadata on FiMfiction.net.

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Special thanks to the fimfic archive for providing an index of all the stories.

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If you want to check the source code for how I made a JSON parser in Java,

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check out the Github project.