hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this monthโs funds drive to charity
You know it legally isย a charity, right?
If x charity aims for ยฃ10, but gets ยฃ15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into theย โrainy dayโ 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 โฆย
The money they aimed for is the bareย minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they donโt justย โpocketโ the rest (as people claim). Itโs not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs someย โrainy dayโ cash to function.ย
You canโt ask a charity to give money to another charity.ย
It needs what it gets to function and improve.ย
kiena-tesedale replied to this post
They donโt โpocketโ 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.) ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย
In my experience, people who donโt 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. Iโm talking โmore than the library of congressโ crazy. The only reason it doesnโt require Netflix levels of data serving is that itโs 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.
Itโs 18 ranks below AO3โฒs traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.
But letโs say you think thatโs 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 thatโs just the archival service.
The 130k also pays for the OTWโs legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.
Itโs 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.
