Women Writers Fight Monetization
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A story about how Archive of Our Own, one of the largest fan fiction websites, was created as a non-profit response to male-dominated monetization attempts.
"In 2007, there was this website called Fan Lib that gets started. They're like 'fan fiction's a great niche, we're gonna build an awesome website, make a bunch of money.' It was a bunch of dudes building this company and all the users were women.
The women were annoyed with how this business was running and that all these men were trying to monetize their work - their attention on the reader side and their writing on the writer side.
In 2009, one of the writers named Naomi writes a blog post saying 'we need an archive of our own,' playing off 'A Room of One's Own' by Virginia Woolf. A bunch of volunteers created Archive of Our Own, which now does 300-400 million visits a month. It's a non-profit that runs entirely off donations like Wikipedia. They raised about $350,000 in donations, have 700 volunteers running it, and it just covers the bandwidth costs to run the site."
Shaan Puri
Host of MFM
Shaan Puri is the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Milk Road. He previously worked at Twitch as a Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming, and Emerging Markets. He also attended Duke University.