to clarify, rather than scold: The Archive Of Our Own is a nonprofit organization that runs an archive of fanfiction, specifically for the purposes of recording and maintaining all fanfics uploaded to it. it was founded after livejournal and fanfiction.net repeatedly deleted queer and ‘problematic’ fanfics in order to please advertisers and keep getting ad revenue. for decades, fandom was at the mercy of corporations who repeatedly deleted–with little warning and no mercy–whatever platforms were used to host fanfiction, especially dark, queer, kinky, and immoral fanfiction that would annoy corporate interests or scare off investors or offend advertisers.
AO3 is specifically relies on donations, rather than ad revenue, because it is the Archive Of Our Own, and is not answerable to any political agenda other than protecting and maintaining, again, all the fanfiction uploaded to it. there are checks and balances, and there’s a governing board, and they’re all dead serious about making sure that the archive endures any attempts by outside parties to censor or remove its content, no matter how abhorrent that content is.
the archive is an archive, not a social network or a platform. it hosts content and it serves that content to users in an efficient way–hence the phenomenal tag system–but it is meant to safeguard writers and their writing, not to profit from its users. it literally can’t profit off of its users or monetize their interactions in any way, just by virtue of its own structure: all money given to a nonprofit goes towards furthering that organization’s mission.
see, when a company or corporation makes money, it pays for labor and upkeep and then the guys that own the company keep the rest of the money, and that’s profit. when a nonprofit makes money, it pays for labor and upkeep and then if it has extra, it reinvests in various ways, like building new things or improving old things, or it saves the money for future labor and upkeep it might need.
the archive cares that users are able to control their own experiences of it, and filter out the stuff they don’t want to see. they care that users are protected from harassment. but they don’t profit from users’ engagement with the site, so they don’t do anything to encourage traffic the way a for-profit site that’s monetized engagement has.
hopefully this explanation helps someone.
tl;dr, a non-profit archive can’t profit from traffic the way for-profit social networks do, so it doesn’t care about you in a completely different way.
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