hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this month’s funds drive to charity
You know it legally is a charity, right?
If x charity aims for £10, but gets £15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into the “rainy day” fund; sometimes servers crash or break, sometimes false reports are made that require the legal team, sometimes you need to hire coders or what not to implement new features or fix bugs or deal with broken code …
The money they aimed for is the bare minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they don’t just “pocket” the rest (as people claim). It’s not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs some “rainy day” cash to function.
You can’t ask a charity to give money to another charity.
It needs what it gets to function and improve.
kiena-tesedale replied to this post
They don’t “pocket” excess money. They have a publicly accessible budget - waaaay more info than most charities, in fact. In it, you can clearly see where each dollar goes. (Also, you are vastly underestimating either how much traffic AO3 gets or how much servers/hosting costs.)
In my experience, people who don’t work in web design and hosting just have no concept of how heavy a load something like AO3 would have. Not only is the traffic absolutely buck wild, but the quantity of data that archive needs to store is fuckoff crazy. I’m talking “more than the library of congress” crazy. The only reason it doesn’t require Netflix levels of data serving is that it’s text based rather than video.
AO3 is in the top 300 websites in the world, and the top 100 in the US. It is the number 2 literature website.
Number 2 in the entire world. JSTOR is 20.
It sees about 6 million people a day. About 250k an hour. Each of those people is loading multiple pages, many are running searches that execute on literally hundreds of potential variables per search. The demands involved are astronomical.
JSTOR, btw, makes 85 million dollars a year.
It’s 18 ranks below AO3′s traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.
But let’s say you think that’s an unfair comparison. Would you say that the Project Gutenberg Literature Archival Group- another text based archive that handles literature operating outside traditional copyright requirements- is more similar?
Because it sees all of 4% of the traffic that AO3 handles.
Care to guess its budget?
Double that of AO3.
AO3 is doing shit on the kind of shoestring budget that I fully, 100% cannot comprehend. And that’s just the archival service.
The 130k also pays for the OTW’s legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.
It’s absolutely batshit fucked up that people are fighting to have the OTW defunded and AO3 shut down. They are the only organized group that actually stands directly between fandom- all the art and the fics and the vids and the music and the chats and the memes and everything we love about interactive, transformative work- and an incalculable amount of lawsuits.
The fundraising drive just held isn’t just for Ao3 either. It’s for OTW, which, as @fangasmagorical said, pays a legal team.
That means that you, or I, or anyone who posts on Ao3, all of us, we don’t have to worry about getting sued by someone like, say, Anne Rice, and not being able to hire our own lawyer. Instead, we can turn to OTW and talk about it with them, and they’ll be there.
Let’s repeat that. OTW is partially a charity legal fund.
But that’s not all!
OTW also runs an academic journal, Transformative Works and Cultures. It’s a peer reviewed open-access journal, and has a, frankly, star-studded editorial board. Most academic journals have full time editors who are paid commensurately to their professorial colleagues because they’re highly trained professionals with PhDs. That means a salary of $60-$100K a year. TWC’s editors are also highly trained professionals. Journals also need to pay for hosting space, marketing, and licensing.
TCW’s 2018 budget is $2,993.99 dollars.
Let’s repeat what this means. TCW doesn’t pay its editors. It operates on the smallest budget imaginable, and still functions as a Gold Open Access journal.
We’re not talking about just one of the most trafficked websites in the world. We’re also talking about a team of lawyers and academics who work for free, helping to make the world a better place. Do we really want to make their jobs (unpaid jobs) harder?