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Yearly attendance of selected furry conventions

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Like these visualizations? You may also be interested in these graphs/maps/charts by Ezen Baklattan. They focus a little more on numbers around convention growth than I do here, which is also interesting to see. Check them out!
NOTE: all convention attendance numbers are verified by my best effort. Keep in mind that A) <your-favorite-convention> is not in a competition with any other conventions and B) conventions frequently do not make this information available easily (some in particular are more reticent than others). The information here is provided on the theory that having a rough idea of how large a con is (and how that has changed over time) may give some insight into what the experience of attending it for yourself may be like. Numbers here are vetted more closely than on the map, but some estimates may still slip through. If you see an inaccurate number here, please let me know and I'll correct it promptly.

Understanding the attendance graphs should be mostly straightforward. Attendance at furry cons likely follows a logistic trend, and so will appear to follow an exponential trend before their inflection point, after which growth tapers off.

Similarly, the growth graphs are fairly straightforward. They represent the percent change a convention experienced from its previous year. Important note: the "Average Growth" line represents the weighted average of growths in our data set, weighted by the number of attendees each convention has. That is, bigger conventions affect it more. The "Total Growth" line represents the change in number of attendees at all conventions in the dataset. For the current year, "Total Growth" measures the growth so far for this year -- that is, on 15 July, "Total Growth" measures the growth of the set of conventions that happened from 1 January to 15 July this year against the growth of the set of conventions that happened from 1 January to 15 July last year. Because the dataset does not contain every single furry convention, both "Average Growth" and "Total Growth" are approximations for how furry conventions as a whole are growing over time. For both of these lines (and "Most Growth" / "Least Growth"), the dots are arbitrarily placed in July of the calendar year the entries represent.

The market share graph is a little stranger. It roughly shows how big any furry convention is, normalized by how many individuals are attending all furry conventions in a given period of time. We might think of this as the relative size of a convention to its peers. As furry conventions are growing simultaneously, a rising market share indicates that a convention is becoming larger in relation to the furry convention scene as a whole, rather than experiencing average growth.

Specifically, "Market Share since Previous Year" describes a convention's market share in the period of time starting immediately after its previous iteration and ending immediately after the iteration under evaluation. If that time period is longer than a year, then it only considers the twelve months directly before the latest iteration. Note that this value can fluctuate for reasons other than growth when conventions change dates (because the period under evaluation for market share is being altered, and so you may have more or fewer other conventions to compare to in that time period).

It should be noted that the market share value operates under some strange assumptions. Most importantly, if taken literally, it assumes that all furries attend exactly one convention. That is, if it is supposed to measure what percentage of the furry fandom attends any convention, it does not properly account for furries who do not attend any conventions (they are always missed by this calculation), nor does it properly account for furries who attend multiple (they are always counted as multiple people). That being said, market share is still a useful value as a first approximation.


Data applying to early years (generally, pre-2002 or so) may be inaccurate, as trustworthy sources are hard to come by. Data outside of early years is largely pulled from this source and the specific WikiFur pages for each convention. Shout out to previous work by Tealeaf Raccoon and whose post was the inspiration for this tool.