hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this monthās funds drive to charity
You know it legally isĀ a charity, right?
If x charity aims for Ā£10, but gets Ā£15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into theĀ ārainy dayā 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 ā¦Ā
The money they aimed for is the bareĀ minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they donāt justĀ āpocketā the rest (as people claim). Itās not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs someĀ ārainy dayā cash to function.Ā
You canāt ask a charity to give money to another charity.Ā
It needs what it gets to function and improve.Ā
kiena-tesedale replied to this post
They donāt āpocketā 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.) Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā
In my experience, people who donāt 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. Iām talking āmore than the library of congressā crazy. The only reason it doesnāt require Netflix levels of data serving is that itās 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.
Itās 18 ranks below AO3ā²s traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.
But letās say you think thatās 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 thatās just the archival service.
The 130k also pays for the OTWās legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.
Itās 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.
