So, I was curious about how common a diaper fetish is, so that I could discern the likelihood of running into a fellow AB/DL...
Disclaimer: I cannot vouch for how accurate this is, this was merely my research based off of various metrics and polls, which can be answered illegitimately.
I had figured I needed some sort of metric, something that measures popularity, and a control value for something that we knew was relatively common... So I figured I'd use Google Trends to check search indexes and put a sock fetish as a control.
Here is a link to the query I used.
The results were.... Surprising. Check it out, we are more common than a lot of us thought.
"Omorashi" (Literally translated to wetting oneself) is one of the most popular fetishes in Japan, and it is also one of the softest core ones, all it involves is having a fetish to people wetting themselves. No nudity or anything. A decent group of these happen to like diapers, but those are not the majority. (They call that "Omutsu omorashi" which literally translates to wetting oneself in a diaper)
Omutsu omorashi is pretty much Japan's version of the DL, which is freakishly uncommon, so we can't really use that to a very large degree for diapers. But surprisingly, a good majority of the search index for supposedly non-diaper-related Omorashi came from the following:
North America, with an index of 50/100 for "omorashi diaper".
This allows us to get the effective index by adding the diaper fetish index to the ratio of the omorashi index to give us a total of an index around 50-ish. And since there seems to be no other special terms for the other fetishes, we are able to sit with this.
When you compare Sock Fetish with Diaper fetish, you now get a ratio of about 2/3 in diaper fetish's favor.
Next I Google'd around and looked at about twelve polls, all of them had different data, but this one in particular seemed about average from the rest of them...
So that would be 25% claimed they had a sock fetish... Since the sexually comfortable index is 2% (I'll assume that percent of people would be the ones who took these quizzes too), when you combine the numbers you get about 0.5% sock fetish rate... And with the 2/3 ratio, we get about a 0.75% diaper fetish percentage.
So, based off of my research, every 1 out of 140-ish people has a diaper fetish of some sort. And since only a small percentage of us know how to use a computer well enough to visit and post on a forum, the percentage that we see online should be on par with the sexually comfortable index times semi-unpopular video games like EVE Online where 1 out of every 150 people that know how to use a computer well enough to post on forums use. Diaper fetishism should yield about 2% of that number. It also means that diaper fetish forums should be about 2% of the size of EVE Online forums... And our overall search volume should be about 2%-ish of theirs.
Off a bit, but with the fudge factor that polls have it's hardly surprising. We actually have 5% of the query count. That's pretty true to my results.
tl;dr - About %0.6-%0.75 of people that can use a computer likely have a diaper fetish.
What do you all think?