>>4644
>When L23 brought up that he thought simply th fandom was less interested in fanfiction I originally considered that the drop in viewership and attention to MLP fan animations was do to the shrinking size of the fandom itself. Now, after looking around do to a couple of different /go/ related ventures. I'm not so sure. There is more data to look at but do to pic related along with a couple other things I noticed I'm starting to agree with him.
Let me copypaste my thought from my personal thread >>4658 because I overlapped my answers with what I had to say here:

"I was going to comment in your /go/ thread that the numbers of fanfics hasn´t only declined because of the fanbase, it´s also (and most importantly) because the fans cannot make any headcanons about the characters. They felt like archetypes and the fanbase had to speculate about every little thing because of how few episodes there were at the time so they invented and wrote fics about their personalities, each fan had a very different interpretation from any other one, they were personally implied."

"Nowadays, the fanfics don´t work around that concept of background ponies, they consist in writing the existent established characters, lore and the worldbuilding that gen 4 has left down the road. The fanbase has to pay attention to the show itself in order to write anything sort of acceptable for gen 4 standards, based on something that has occurred on the show. This requires effort and time. One fan can write a random story at anytime but it won´t be taken seriously but if one wants to go further, watching the show becomes essential and not all the fanbase has done that. That trend can change over the years because we will all know gen 4 and there are no hiatuses nor further speculations towards its world that hasn´t been already done. That´s the main difference and my analysis about that downhill trend in the yearly numbers."

And even then, my words are just a personal assumption from the observations that I have managed to sense. Simply another hypothesis out of thousands in order to explain this phenomenon. Indeed, the Derpibooru numbers are steadily growing but I didn´t know that FimFiction has repeated almost the same path as the fanbase´s popularity. This could reaffirm that those who are writing fanfics nowadays (for the most part) have taken the show standards into account beforehand.