InsaneJournal

Math is ugly.
OTW (aka the Organization for Transformative Works/Wank)
Status: Tax exempt, .org (usually associated with not-for-profit groups)
Income: Good question, though we know there was at least one straight-up $500 donation and there's a decent number of official members.
Accomplishments: Nothing.
It takes two weeks tops to get a wiki together. It takes maybe two hours to attach a messageboard to a site. The OTW's been promising these things and more for over a year--and while doing so, they've taken in an unspecified amount of money as donations and membership fees for what continues to be a Livejournal-based community.
People starting movements/freaking out over this? 0 ETA: I'm told there's some, somewhere.

Fanfiction.net (aka The Pit, Pit of Voles)
Income: 60-80 million dollars a year ETA: Numbers are being called into question. For all my luck they're borked, though the source that triggered (I repeat, triggered, not made) the original fanthro post was certainly someone in the know.
Income, though? Still a lot. ETA2: This one says more than 4 million a year.
People starting movements/freaking out over this? I seem to remember seeing . . . one.
Seriously, let's crunch some numbers and make this a little more real to people. The data from '07 said ff.net gets 1-4 cents per adview. They have between one and four ads per page--anyone who's loaded a page there knows this.

We'll take the middle-of-the-road numbers: two and a half cents per ad, about two and a half ads per page.

.025 x 2.5 = .0625 per pageview.

Now let's expand upon that. My three most-read stories, between them, have more than 365,000 hits.

365000 x .0625 = $22,812.50

If the numbers are right, Fanfiction.net has easily made more than twenty-three thousand dollars off just a few of my stories alone.

Twenty-three thousand dollars.

That's more than half my student loans. That's the Master's degree I couldn't afford to go back for. And the more I sit and look at that number, the more pissed off I get. For that much you'd think they'd be on the ball with plagiarism reports, or have coding that didn't eat your formatting and wording, or have ads that didn't give you spyware every few days. You know, like Fanlib did. Whoops, Fanlib was transparent about its intentions to make money, and talk of making money in regards to fandom is sorta like summoning the Antichrist and inviting him to bang your mom on the dinner table. Onlookers tend to flip the fuck out.

(And even if the numbers are borked and we shoot for the extremely low end, they've made enough off my writing in total to pay off my car.)


Is fandom massively spazzing out over ff.net, or the membership dues paid to an essentially dead organization, or any of the other half-dozen things that are making money off fans/fanworks? No, they'd currently rather be piling on Fanhistory for being a dotcom, for having a single ad per page, and for Laura H. trying to market the thing. And since Fanhistory's venture capital page went up around March, this dogpile's just a little late to the party.



I'll start laughing when it's funny.



Long multi-faceted Fanhistory.com wank relatively short: Yes, I know Laura H's gone about things the wrong way. Yes, Laura knows she's gone about things the wrong way. Was she/Fanhistory clear that if someone on Fanhistory wanted their name or page down, they should say so? Yes. Would it have been done? Yes--if worse came to worse, I would've done it myself.

Does the entire name fuss look remarkably like what happens when a few spastic Black Jewels Trilogy fans go through ff.net reporting & flaming everyone they see because they say Anne Bishop said she doesn’t want fic written? Hell yes. (If Bishop doesn't want fic written, Bishop would tell ff.net herself. It's only the big girl thing to do.)

Has this entire mess, initiated under the flag of protecting someone's RL-name from association with their fandom pen name, only served to out that connection to however many people didn't know of it yet? Yes. And is that connection still made in numerous other locations online--most notably by the person herself? Yes.

Has there been this much internet attention because the target isn't exactly a well-liked individual, & because her opinions don't tend to mesh with everyone else's? Yes.

Has Laura since said she's going to change her methods of interaction, espc. in relation to the wiki? Yes. And even though it's only been ugly when she tries to engage the shrieking dissenters, she's got a public apology in the works. So if that was the goal, the goal's been attained.

Me, I'm a dirty optimist. I believe people can change if they want to. I also believe they'll need backup and direction to keep them out of trouble--a theory of social responsibility, in a way. It applies to everything. You wanna see things get better? Help out. You just wanna sit around and bitch? You're part of the problem.

So I'm putting my money--or my lack of it--where my mouth is. It's a wiki. Wikis are collaborative. Laura's taking a step back, in the interests of Fanhistory and its future. Now it's time for the rest of the community to decide where they stand.