Now I'm curious how AO3 fundraised at the earliest days. I mean, obviously AO3 wasn't well-known at the start so maybe OTW wasn't be able to do fundraising to buy the first server like they do know 🤔
I remember a fundraising Halloween party at astolat’s place right at the very beginning.
I think the main answer is that AO3 was founded by a community. People volunteered in droves because we were already connected, and not in that vague-ass “I saw your viral post once” way that fandom is now. These were people who ran cons together or who attended cons run by the movers and shakers founding AO3. We were a community that understood that it needed to contribute, both with money and labor, to get things done.
I don’t recall the exact form requests for donations took. One could probably find more info by going to Livejournal (as opposed to the news posts on AO3). There was huge community buy-in from a community of 30-somethings with jobs, and the server needs at the time were much, much smaller.
Fundraising will get harder with time, not easier, because AO3 has now attracted the attention of wider fandom, a group far less likely to donate and that exists on a scale that is very expensive to host.
I think people forget that AO3 started off with one server and a few hundred users (I’m number 2759 and I joined in 2009, after it had already come out of closed beta). The fundraising needs, though not totally insignificant, were not anywhere near what they are today. A handful of donors was enough to get things off the ground. Nobody started out by saying “we need $400k this year just to keep the lights on”, it was more like “we need $1000 for a server so we can get things started”.
The first fundraising drive that I can find in our records is from Fall 2008 and raised $2338, with 31 people who donated $10 or more to become members (I don’t see a total number of donors, just members, so I don’t know how many donated less than $10). Before that I think donations were just done more informally, rather than as a drive - people just pitching in money as needed, or when they had some extra cash.
The next drive, in Spring 2009, raised $11,142 from 396 donors. Here is a post from a little later that year explaining the costs of the servers that would allow the Archive to enter open beta, which had been purchased with the funds raised: https://www.transformativeworks.org/archive-news-4-colocation-and-open-beta/ - $8,165 for two servers (including additional RAM and shipping expenses) and ongoing costs of $228/month.
These early drives were really heavily marketed on Livejournal, DW, Insanejournal when it still existed, Twitter, etc. etc. They would run for an entire week, with multiple posts per day across various platforms encouraging donations, both from the OTW and from individual members making their own posts. There were emails to current users. There were talking points for members about how to bring up the OTW in your book group/fan club/knitting circle/whatever. There were physical handouts for cons and other RL events. There were lolcats for meme-worthy advertising (yes really). In short, they were scrounging for money and they marketed themselves accordingly (and I say that with great affection and as an early donor.)
So while I’d say that it’s in one sense ‘harder’ to get donations now (because of a bigger userbase with more diffuse connections and less of a sense of why funds are needed), OTW fundraising drives are actually a lot less assertive than they used to be. There is still a ton of work that goes into the back end of running a drive, of course, including designing, making, and shipping rewards for the various donation levels, which weren’t a thing back then, but the front-facing presence is much less overt, and this is a deliberate choice. One post at the start of the drive, one post at the end, a banner on the site (which can be dismissed), a graph tracking donations, and an email to existing users. If funds started running short, they could certainly go more aggressive on the drives, but they don’t currently have to.
My user number is 2025; I remember being a little skeptical of OTW at the start, though obviously I wanted it to succeed.
While I believe that OTW should be doing more to support independent archives in situ rather than just Open Doorsing everything, thus basically making AO3 one half of a de-facto monopoly on fic (the other half being Fanfiction.net), I still think the organization is one of the best things to ever happen to the fandom. Which is why I give every time the drive comes up.
If only we can talk about what it would take to actually keep indie single-fandom or smaller archives alive, too. Because while AO3 is a miracle, a whole lot is lost when an indie archive dies. Whole communities are lost. It’s not just the fic; Open Doors preserves that. But not the comments. Not the forums. Not the friendships.
Maybe someone with more time and spoons than I have can help champion that cause.
My actual response to the reddit thread about Bones bc you know I couldn’t resist:
1shirt2shirtredshirtdeadshirt:
“Bones isn’t saying he is 100% ignorant about the physiology of Vulcans, he is saying that he feels uncomfortable as a professional carrying out an experimental procedure that he has never done firsthand in those conditions. There were a lot of factors that made this particular event very stressful for Bones.
While he has read about the procedure in practice, he has never done any real-world field application of the Vulcan surgical techniques and training that he did receive.
He’s not saying "I don’t know how to do this” – clearly, because he does the procedure successfully.
He is saying “I’ve never done this procedure in real life on a living Vulcan; as a medical professional, this is a highly unusual and a risky situation with the stressors compounded (ship shaking all over the place, experimental blood transfusions, attempted murder and mayhem afoot).
He is saying "I’m scared to do this on my best friend slash the best first officer in the fleet plus his dad who is an immensely valuable diplomat in this insane set of circumstances.”
What sane doctor doesn’t feel nervous about performing a highly experimental medical procedure plus surgery on two individuals who have no backup blood on board if things go sour? (Spock was able to experimentally generate just enough Vulcan blood to do the procedure so if anything went awry, they’d both die).
Plus the fact that the ship was getting thrown all over the place while he was performing delicate heart surgery … I feel like all things considered, McCoy had a justifiable right to be nervous and say so.
That’s also something I loved about his character; he was fallible, humble, and had no qualms voicing when he felt out of his depth or uncomfortable. But in that same breath, if someone – anyone – needed his help despite his reservations, he’d always step up to the plate to try to help.“
The ring that Kelley wore was a woman’s. It was won in a card game shortly after World War I by De’s uncle. He gave to his sister. When she died decades later, it was the only possession of hers that De wanted. When Gene Roddenberry hired De to play, Dr. McCoy, De insisted that “you can’t have me if I can’t have my ring,” and Roddenberry relented. What’s interesting is that in nuTrek, Karl Urban wore his Starfleet Academy ring on the pinky finger of his left hand, in tribute to Deforest Kelly.
I was supposed to do stuff this weekend but the website’s down, so I’ve just spent my time like
[ID: A meme from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, where a character is standing in front of a pinboard, staring to the right with wild eyes and gesticulating with a pen in his left hand. The pinboard has been edited to be a sort of Kirk/Spock moodboard, with screenshots from the Star Trek: The Original Series episode Operation: Annihilate. The first one on the left has Jim captioned saying “I need you, Spock.” The screenshot on the top right quotes Bones saying to Kirk “I understand your concern… your affection for Spock….” and the one on the bottom right is of Spock saying “Let me help.” to an offscreen Jim. End ID]
I didn’t authorize this photo of me to be posted online.🤣🙌 I feel so seen.
[ID: A screenshot from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home AKA The One With the Whales. Sarek is pictured debating with a Klingon Ambassador about whether Kirk should be arrested for his involvement with the Genesis project. The subtitles of the Klingon ambassador have been edited to say “Personal bias. Kirk is [Sarek’s] son-in-law.” End ID]
idk why people still don’t think spirk is canon when they literally said this in tvh :/
