Mostly Sambucky

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. 

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.

Thanks for the tag @abarbaricyalp ❤️

No pressure tagging @jbarneswilson @katatonicimpression @sunsetmaidenwrites

So, I started this months ago, wrote about 2300 words and then kinda forgot about it lol. Hopefully I’ll finish it in 2025!

“Sammy,” Bucky yelled, from where he was sprawled out on their bed. “Your phone’s ringing.”

Sam paused his flossing to yell back:

“The Stark phone, or my phone phone.”

“Your phone phone.”

“Who is it?”

Bucky’s responding sigh was so heavy that Sam heard it all the way in the bathroom, but he only laughed fondly and shook his head. It was before noon on one of their very few and very precious days off, so of course his boyfriend had to act like moving, even a few inches, was going to kill him.

“A name didn’t pop up, and I don’t recognize the number,” Bucky yelled again, and this time there was a frown on his face.

Now, Bucky trusted Sam completely, but there wasn’t a single solitary phone number that called Sam’s personal phone that Bucky wouldn’t recognize, so the fact that he didn’t recognize this one was kind of throwing him for a loop.

“Well, answer it. I’m busy,” Sam said.

He didn’t say it, but the “duh” was heavily implied in Sam’s tone, and it had Bucky successfully sidestepping that loop that had just been threatening to send him spiraling a second ago. Of course Sam wasn’t hiding anything. It was probably just someone calling the wrong number.

“Hello?” Bucky said into the phone, but all he heard in return was dead air.

Bucky pulled it away from his ear to look at the screen. But, yeah, he was right — whoever it was had hung up.

“Humph,” he grunted, to himself. His frown from a moment before returning, this time deeper. “They hung—

He started to shout to Sam again, but then the phone started ringing, again. The same number. Again.

That time he answered it immediately.

“Who is this?” He asked, in lieu of a greeting. There was no mistaking the bite in his voice.

“Who is this?” The voice on the other end responded.

Oddly though, at least in Bucky’s opinion, whoever it was didn’t sound irritated or like he was being a smart-alec. No, he sounded genuinely confused, maybe even a little upset.

It didn’t cut much ice with Bucky though. Some strange man — some strange man who apparently had no idea how phone calls worked — was calling his fiancé’s phone, and hanging up when his fiance didn’t answer. So, of course Bucky’s hackles were all the way up.

“You called me, pal.”

“Well, I was trying to call Sammy.” He cleared his throat. “I mean, Samuel Wilson. This is his phone, right?” He asked, somewhat frantically. “They said this was his phone.”

“Who said—

“Buck,” Sam said, finally walking into their bedroom from the en-suite. “Who is it?”

“I don’t—

He started to reply, but was cut off by the caller practically yelling into his ear.

“Sammy? Sam, is that you? Put Sam on,” he insisted, sounding near tears. “Please.”

The guy was practically begging at that point. And even though Bucky was confused, even though the whole thing was putting him on the defensive, there was something about the guy’s voice. There was a legitimately desperate quality to it. Like maybe his life depended on getting to speak to Sam at that very moment.

In the end, that’s what made Bucky give Sam the phone.

“It’s for you,” he said, nonsensically.

Sam eyed him strangely, questioningly.

“Put it on speaker,” was all Bucky said in response.

And although Sam looked confused, he still did it before speaking.

“Hello,” he said, somewhat cautiously.

But instead of a reply, the person let out such a pitiful sound, something so close to a sob that Sam wondered if they’d actually started to cry, that the hair on the back of Sam’s neck stood up.

He waited for the person to say something, anything, but all he could hear was the sound of them taking deep shuddering breaths over and over again. And, look, any other time, he probably would’ve chalked it up to a prank call and hung up, but his gut was telling him that this wasn’t some idiot playing a joke; this was somebody who really needed him. So, he tried again.

“Hello?” Sam repeated, voice as gentle as he could make it. “Is everything—

“Sammy,” he cut in, voice heavy with emotion. “Is it really finally—

Before they could get another word out, Sam ended the call. Then he held the phone away from him, eyeing it suspiciously, before tossing it on the bed like he was loath to touch it — almost like he was scared to touch it.

Bucky didn’t know what was going on, but he shot off the bed, suddenly looking at Sam’s cell the way he’d looked at that alien tech they’d run into the last time they helped Monica on a mission.

“Sam, what the hell?” He asked, his gaze flicking back and forth between the phone and Sam’s dazed face. “Who was that?”