Staffed by more than 600 volunteers across OTW’s projects, the site’s maintenance and upkeep are funded by donation drives that seek out relatively modest sums of money (in the $100,000 range, compared to the millions Wikipedia and the Internet Archive take in during their campaigns). It is an explicitly non-commercial space users are forbidden from soliciting money, including linking to sites like Kickstarter, Patreon, and Ko-fi. It preserves old archives while fans continually upload new works the archive recently announced it had accumulated works from over 30,000 individual fandoms. It hosts 4.2 million fanworks, including fiction, art, videos, and critical commentary (or “meta”), but the vast majority is fan fiction. Over a decade later, AO3 has become the predominant space for fan-fic on the web.
They named the project after A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s seminal feminist work, calling it the Archive of Our Own, or AO3. Its central project was a web archive for fan-fic where the servers would be owned by the fans themselves, funded through donations rather than ads or VC backing, and protected by lawyers who could push back against corporations, protecting fanworks under fair use. In 2007, a group of fans - many of whom were lawyers, academics, or professional writers in their day jobs - founded the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), a nonprofit that would preserve fanworks and protect the interests of fans in a rapidly shifting digital landscape.
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