Deviant Art is one of the most well established and largest fan art communities out there. It’s statistically relevant.
Reddit user Vastava_Viz set about mining Deviant Art for fan art. The goal? A nice data visual showing popularity.
Vastava’s technique was simple but fair. Each of the keywords above (Shrek, Rainbow Dash, Mario, Sonic, etc.) was given to Deviant Art’s search engine, and a note was taken of the number of matches. Yes, there are more sophisticated methodologies, but for the purposes of a surface analysis to empower the graph, this works for me.
I expected Pikachu and Batman to be strong performers. I was not expecting Naruto to be such a strong performer, but the ninja is twice a popular subject as Batman.
As strong as Naruto is, he’s edged out by Sonic. Technically, not “Sonic the Hedgehog”, but just “Sonic” as that was the search term used.
