As so often happens during AO3's twice-annual donation drives, people keep asking why AO3 gets more than their goal and yet [individal] can't get their GoFundMe funded.
There are various reasons, of course - and if I'm honest, I'm more angry about those GoFundMes needing to exist at all than I am about how people choose to allot their charitable giving. But I think the one that no one accounts for is just sheer numbers.
As I write this, it's the Sunday of the April donation drive of 2021. The goal was $50,000 (down from previous years) and right now the total is $257,812.43. That's a lot of money - to an individual. But AO3 is a website, not a person, and it's a site used by 3,581,000 registered users (according to the front page when I'm logged out).
Do the math on that. 3.5 million users donated a total of $250K. That works out to each registered user donating a little over 7 cents. When you consider that there are even more people who don't have accounts, it's more likely the equivalent of each person chipping in a nickel or less.
So yes, AO3 hits its goal every time and yes, they surpass it. They're a valued part of fandom for a lot of people, but even still the number of individual people who donate money is usually less than ten thousand. Out of three and a half million.
I too am outraged that people need to set up GoFundMes in order to pay their medical bills or their rent, but it's not AO3's fault that those funds need to exist and it's not AO3's fault that they reach enough people that a tiny percent of those people can fill their goal.
