I suspect over time we'll see specific areas of the fandom having their own awards, just as rather than one convention or website getting bigger and bigger we have lots of them. But the UMAs could be bigger or smaller depending on what\s done to support it.
I think the UMAs would get a lot more votes and nominees every year - and the voting might be less subject to promotional swings - if they just emailed people who they knew were interested enough to vote last time to tell them when they could nominate and vote the next year. Heck, maybe email to tell them who won, too? If there's concern about privacy and/or spam, add a checkbox to let people decide if they want to be informed, and have an unsubscribe link in the MIME header so it's easy to do so.
It really depends on the extent to which people promote it, although I must admit that this year the war in Ukraine has been something of a distraction too. 2014 was very obviously CollegeHumor promoting Furry Force (per Patch quoting Sy Sable at the time - but also, just look at the stats). And hey, it might have led to Furry Force 3.
I suspect over time we'll see specific areas of the fandom having their own awards, just as rather than one convention or website getting bigger and bigger we have lots of them. But the UMAs could be bigger or smaller depending on what\s done to support it.
I think the UMAs would get a lot more votes and nominees every year - and the voting might be less subject to promotional swings - if they just emailed people who they knew were interested enough to vote last time to tell them when they could nominate and vote the next year. Heck, maybe email to tell them who won, too? If there's concern about privacy and/or spam, add a checkbox to let people decide if they want to be informed, and have an unsubscribe link in the MIME header so it's easy to do so.
Also, to provide more detail for your graph: in 2008 (presumably the 2007 awards), there were 203 ballots, which was then considered quite high. It then increased to 270 for the 2008 awards, before "nominations and votes were recorded from over 1,100 fans" for 2009, 1,372 for 2010, and 1,782 for 2011. I think by then it was thankfully a less-manual process.