{"id":280481,"date":"2018-10-18T03:25:17","date_gmt":"2018-10-18T03:25:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2018\/10\/18\/hey-ao3-can-you-like-give-the-extra-38k-you-made\/"},"modified":"2018-10-18T03:25:17","modified_gmt":"2018-10-18T03:25:17","slug":"hey-ao3-can-you-like-give-the-extra-38k-you-made","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2018\/10\/18\/hey-ao3-can-you-like-give-the-extra-38k-you-made\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

minim-calibre<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

fangasmagorical<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

blooming-wilting<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

gladnis<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this month\u2019s funds drive to charity<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

You know it legally is<\/i>\u00a0a charity, right?<\/p>\n

If x charity aims for \u00a310, but gets \u00a315, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into the\u00a0\u201crainy day\u201d 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 \u2026\u00a0<\/p>\n

The money they aimed for is the bare\u00a0minimum<\/i>, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they don\u2019t just\u00a0\u201cpocket\u201d the rest (as people claim). It\u2019s not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs some\u00a0\u201crainy day\u201d cash to function.\u00a0<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t ask a charity to give money to another charity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It needs what it gets to function and improve.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

kiena-tesedale<\/a> replied to this post<\/p>\n

\n They don\u2019t \u201cpocket\u201d excess money. They have a
\npublicly accessible budget – waaaay more info than most charities, in
\nfact. In it, you can clearly see where each dollar goes. (Also, you are
\nvastly underestimating either how much traffic AO3 gets or how much
\nservers\/hosting costs.) \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In my experience, people who don\u2019t work in web design and hosting just have no<\/i> concept of how heavy a load something like AO3 would have. Not only is the traffic absolutely buck wild, but the quantity<\/i> of data that archive needs to store is fuckoff crazy<\/i>.
\n I\u2019m talking \u201cmore than the library of congress\u201d crazy. The only reason
\nit doesn\u2019t require Netflix levels of data serving is that it\u2019s text
\nbased rather than video. <\/p>\n

AO3 is in the top 300 websites in the world<\/i>, and the top 100 in the US. It is the number 2 literature website. <\/p>\n

Number 2 in the entire world<\/i>. JSTOR is 20<\/i>. <\/p>\n

It sees about 6 million people a day<\/i>.
\nAbout 250k an hour<\/i>. Each of those people is loading multiple pages, many are running
\nsearches that execute on literally hundreds of potential variables per
\nsearch. The demands involved are astronomical.<\/p>\n

JSTOR, btw, makes 85 million dollars a year<\/i>. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s 18 ranks below AO3\u2032s traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money<\/b><\/i>.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s say you think that\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n

Because it sees all of 4% of the traffic that AO3 handles. <\/p>\n

Care to guess its budget?<\/p>\n

Double that of AO3.<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n

AO3 is doing shit on the kind of shoestring budget that I fully, 100% cannot comprehend. And that\u2019s just<\/i> the archival service. <\/p>\n

The 130k also pays for the OTW\u2019s legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist<\/i>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s
\n absolutely batshit fucked up that people are fighting to have the OTW
\ndefunded and AO3 shut down. They are the only organized group that
\nactually stands directly between fandom- all the art and the fics and
\nthe vids and the music and the chats and the memes and everything we
\nlove about interactive, transformative work- and an incalculable amount of lawsuits.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The number of people on this blue hellsite who apparently do not understand how nonprofits work is mind-boggling (pro tip: by definition, THEY DON\u2019T MAKE A PROFIT), as is the number of people with no idea about the cost of running something that gets that much traffic.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

minim-calibre: fangasmagorical: blooming-wilting: gladnis: hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this month\u2019s funds drive to charity You know it legally is\u00a0a charity, right? If x charity aims for \u00a310, but gets \u00a315, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[1070,4],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280481"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280481\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}