hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this month’s funds drive to charity
You know it legally is a charity, right?
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.
It’s
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.
Recently (a month and a half ago) my mom kicked me out of her house which I only moved to in July of this year for reasons I won’t disclose at this time. And since then, as some of you may know, I’ve been living with my girlfriend (tumblr user @fandomsandanythingelse ) in Utah. A bus ticket courtesy of my best friend (tumblr user @everchangingmetamorphmagus ) who has since been a great beam of support.
However as of today we have a minimum of 30 days to figure out somewhere else to go.
I currently don’t have a job or a state ID because my mom screwed me over and lost my birth certificate and social security card. (I just received new copies from my father but I still need proof of residence to get an ID and I don’t have that yet), and my girlfriends job is basically only paying for her car insurance and gas.
Currently I am trying to get an ID so I can get a job, and my girlfriend is currently on the lookout for a new job.
We have someone who wants to be our roommate but the problem is they are leaving right around when we would be moving in, and the only way we can afford to live here is if we have a roommate.
We’re looking at upwards of $2000 dollars for a deposit and first and last months rent to get an apartment. Plus utilities, phone bills, and internet if we move somewhere with no WiFi.
If you can donate please please think about it, I’ll even do commissions if you request something specific (writing only -check my commissions post here-)
If you can’t donate, please share this post, and I’ll add a link to my girlfriends post here, so you can share that one too.
Anxiety-prone-human 