Hey! Nobody has asked me that to the best of my recollection. I don’t have stats on it and don’t know anyone who does – but if someone has data/knows of relevant data, please reply!

Based on the AO3 homepage, we can get the following info:

“more than 83,040 fandoms | 11,800,000 users | 18,550,000 works”

Which means that in one sense the average (mean) is 18.55/11.80 = ~1.57 works per AO3 user. However, a lot of users post nothing (as you allude to in your example stats). And even among people who do post, averages of this sort are wildly skewed by outliers – some individuals have thousands of fanworks and drag the average way up.

I have a bunch of further methodology thoughts below on how to try to get better answers through scraping. But first – a poll! (This poll will inevitably be biased toward people who post to AO3, because of who follows me and who is likely to participate in polls. Still, why not start here? :) )

Please share your exact answer in the tags/comments if you feel like it!

Okay! Further methodology thoughts/questions about author stats:

Keep reading