Quote:None of those would favour one character's fandom over another. It's not as if people are significantly more likely to write songfics about Spike than about Xander, or as if ff.net goes easy on Xander-fic authors. Smut is allowed on ff.net within limits, which are broad enough to encompass much slash - e.g over 200 pages of M-rated Harry/Draco stories.
FF.net is *never* a particularly good indication of a fandom because they:
a) Don't like songfic.
b) Have a tendency to drive away authors.
c) Don't allow smut.
For comparison, Google says there 64,000 pages for the search "Xander fanfic -Spike" and 263,000 for the search "Spike fanfic -Xander". Not all these pages are actual fanfics, but the fraction that are looks pretty similar, and the Xander-fic/Spike-fic ratio is fairly close to that for ff.net,
especially since I didn't attempt to exclude Spike in AtS fics.
Certainly, there are some archives where Spike-fic is overwhelmingly more popular than Xander-fic and some where he is rarely seen outside Spike's bedroom, but those archives are not necessarily a representive cross section of the fandom, even if they happen to be your main source of Buffy-fic. There are other, slightly smaller archive where Xander-fic predominates, and never the twain shall meet.
For all its many faults, ff.net does at least give a fairly representative random cross-section of the Buffy fandom.