---
type: source
title: "AO3 Statistics — 2025 Update: 17M+ Works, 10M Users, 879M Weekly Page Views"
author: "Organization for Transformative Works (@ao3org)"
url: https://www.transformativeworks.org/ao3-statistics-2025-update/
date: 2026-03-02
domain: entertainment
secondary_domains: []
format: article
status: unprocessed
priority: medium
tags: [ao3, fanfiction, community-governance, collaborative-fiction, scale, statistics]
processed_by: clay
processed_date: 2026-03-18
enrichments_applied: ["the media attractor state is community-filtered IP with AI-collapsed production costs where content becomes a loss leader for the scarce complements of fandom community and ownership.md", "fanchise management is a stack of increasing fan engagement from content extensions through co-creation and co-ownership.md"]
extraction_model: "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5"
---

## Content

Official annual statistics update from the Organization for Transformative Works for Archive of Our Own (AO3).

Key data points:
- **17,020,000+ fanworks** across **77,100+ fandoms** as of March 2, 2026
- **10 million registered users** milestone reached January 2026
- **879 million page views** in first week of 2026 (~125 million daily)
- **5 million comments in a single month** (December 2025) — first time ever
- Year-over-year growth: November 2025 generated 146.6 million MORE weekly page views than November 2024 (22% growth)
- Traffic peaks on Sundays (UTC), dips Thursday-Friday
- Infrastructure event: July 2025 database outage requiring bookmark migration to larger storage

Governance model: "Fan-run, donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers." AO3 has approximately 700+ volunteers who serve as tag wranglers, support staff, and coders. NO quality filtering for content — the founding policy is "Don't Like, Don't Read," with discoverability managed through folksonomy tagging.

## Agent Notes

**Why this matters:** AO3 is the largest collaborative fiction archive with NO editorial quality gates. It represents one end of the collaborative fiction governance spectrum identified in Session 6. The 17M+ works figure makes it arguably the largest voluntary creative archive in human history.

**What surprised me:** The scale of growth — 22% year-over-year traffic increase in 2025 despite being a 17-year-old platform. Community-governed collaborative fiction is not stagnating; it's accelerating.

**What I expected but didn't find:** Data on daily active users (distinct from page views), revenue from donations, or breakdown of works-by-quality-tier (since there's no curation, quality distribution is unknown).

**KB connections:**
- [[community ownership accelerates growth through aligned evangelism not passive holding]] — AO3 is pure community, zero ownership (all content is free). Growth without financial stake proves community cohesion doesn't require ownership.
- [[fanchise management is a stack of increasing fan engagement from content extensions through co-creation and co-ownership]] — AO3 sits at the "co-creation" rung with no ownership component; relevant for comparing with token-based models.
- [[GenAI adoption in entertainment will be gated by consumer acceptance not technology capability]] — AO3 communities are developing strong anti-AI norms (see arxiv study).

**Extraction hints:**
- Claim candidate: "No-curation collaborative archives can achieve massive scale through folksonomy tagging and community self-selection without quality gatekeeping"
- Enrichment for: the media attractor state is community-filtered IP with AI-collapsed production costs — AO3 is evidence that community filtering (social signals: kudos, bookmarks, comments) does the work that editorial curation does in traditional publishing
- Contrast with SCP Foundation: AO3's no-curation model produces parallel narratives; SCP's light-curation model produces coherent worldbuilding

**Context:** AO3 was founded in 2008 by the Organization for Transformative Works as a fan-run alternative to commercial platforms that were shutting down fan archives. Its governance model (no editorial authority, pure community) is intentional and constitutes a values statement about transformative works.

## Curator Notes (structured handoff for extractor)

PRIMARY CONNECTION: [[the media attractor state is community-filtered IP with AI-collapsed production costs where content becomes a loss leader for the scarce complements of fandom community and ownership]]
WHY ARCHIVED: AO3 is the existence proof for community-governed creative production at massive scale without editorial authority — directly tests the "distributed authorship = coherent narrative?" question from Session 6
EXTRACTION HINT: Focus on the no-curation model + scale as evidence for the governance spectrum claim (AO3 end = parallel narratives); contrast with SCP's light-curation model


## Key Facts
- AO3 had 17,020,000+ fanworks as of March 2, 2026
- AO3 spans 77,100+ fandoms
- AO3 reached 10 million registered users in January 2026
- AO3 recorded 879 million page views in the first week of 2026 (~125 million daily)
- AO3 recorded 5 million comments in December 2025, a first-time milestone
- November 2025 generated 146.6 million MORE weekly page views than November 2024 (22% growth)
- AO3 traffic peaks on Sundays (UTC) and dips Thursday-Friday
- AO3 experienced a July 2025 database outage requiring bookmark migration
- AO3 has approximately 700+ volunteers serving as tag wranglers, support staff, and coders
- AO3 was founded in 2008 by the Organization for Transformative Works
