Archive of Our Own (often shortened to AO3) is a nonprofit open source repository for fanfiction and other fanworks contributed by users. The site was created in 2008 by the Organization for Transformative Works and went into open beta in 2009. As of 2 May 2023, Archive of Our Own hosts 11,050,000 works in over 57,840 fandoms. The site has received positive reception for its curation, organization and design, mostly done by readers and writers of fanfiction. In 2007, a website called FanLib was created with the goal of monetizing fanfiction. Fanfiction was authored primarily by women, and FanLib, which was run entirely by men, drew criticism. This ultimately led to the creation of the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) which sought to record and archive fan cultures and works. OTW created Archive of Our Own (abbreviated AO3) in October 2008 and established it as an open beta on 14 November 2009. The site's name was derived from a blog post by the writer Naomi Novik who, responding to FanLib's lack of interest in fostering a fannish community, called for the creation of "An Archive of One's Own." The name is inspired by the essay A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf, in which Woolf said that a writer needed space, time, and resources in order to create. AO3 defines itself primarily as an archive and not an online community. More information...
According to PR-model, archiveofourown.org is ranked 40,936th in multilingual Wikipedia, in particular this website is ranked 27,411th in English Wikipedia.
The website is placed before spazionapoli.it and after itun.es in the BestRef global ranking of the most important sources of Wikipedia.
