Things heating up in the grammer fandom

Someone else pointed out that Fandom is a perfectly cromulent word. In fact, Merriam shows it’s in the bottom 40%, and was made in 1903. Fanbase, however, is in the bottom 10% and no date listed. So if anything, fanbase is the ‘fake’ word.

I myself use the two words to mean two different things. A fanbase is what an artist or company can rely upon as a source of income. A fandom is a culture of fans that are interested in a particular subject, but may or may not be a fanbase of any one particular company. Beliebers are a fanbase because they are devoted to giving him money. Punk rockers are in a fandom because its members may be creators instead of simply buyers, and the buyers support no one specific content creator.

The MLP fanbase are people who consistently buy Hasbro merchandise. But the MLP fandom may have people with OCs or webcomic makers who never once bought the actual toys.