AO3 was built to be non-commercial, to support the gift economy that inspired so many fanworks creators.
Changing that would be a betrayal of all the people who worked on the site.
Anyone who wants a commercially linked fanfic site, can make one. Or, since that is very overwhelming for one person, can get together with a few dozen other people, find some who know code and some who know business setups and some who know law, and build themselves an archive.
That’s how AO3 did it, after all. It didn’t start with several hundred volunteers and a board of directors. It started with a handful of fans saying “fuck this shit forever; we need to make it ourselves.”
So when we say, “You could make an archive!!!” we’re not being snide. We’re not trying to say “shut up and go away.” We’re saying: “No really, if this matters so much to you, you can make a space with your own rules. It can be done. We did it, with a lot fewer resources than you have today.” (Don’t get me started on the state of filesharing in 2008.) AO3 itself is open source - you can even copy as much of its structure as you like.
What you DON’T get to do, is tell those of us who poured our souls into making the archive site of our dreams, that times have changed and it needs to make other fans happy now.
If you’re not happy with AO3, you don’t need to use it. If it offends you, block the URL and move on.
But you don’t get to use it for a few months, even a few years, and decide that the people who built it somehow overlooked the possibility of income and they need to change it now.
No, we didn’t “forget” to allow for monetization. Money is specifically excluded from motivation to post at AO3. You not only can’t money at AO3; you can’t say “I moneyed for this somewhere else.” Money economy is NOT WELCOME at AO3, and that’s on purpose.
There are a million other websites where you can ask for money for your fanworks. You don’t even have to remove stuff from AO3 to post on those. But you can’t link them.
Money does weird things to people’s brains, warps people’s relationships, has strange and often unpleasant effects on art. We want none of it.
So we said: We’ll make an archive. And we will NOT have advertising, and we will NOT have please-pay-me buttons, and we will ask for donations to run it. And if we don’t get much, it will just… be small. Very tiny. It will be as big as we can afford to make it, with money made by asking “hey how would you like to see an archive of fanworks when there’s no money pressure involved?”
AO3 is working as intended. It’s not broken. It’s not missing modern features. It’s stlil in beta because it’s missing some of the features initially planned for it - including image hosting. But it’s not an oversight that there’s no commercial activity allowed or planned.
I got paid for my labor with AN ARCHIVE FULL OF FICS BY MY FAVORITE AUTHORS. No money could’ve bought that for me.
romaincrisis
jacobvanloon
dailybridgerton
titsay
discoholicmusic
vaporwave
gummygunk
