Archive of Our Own ^beta

In 2020, we gave you some insight into our traffic numbers, focusing on the impact that global lockdowns had on our user base. Five years later, we have not only sustained that rise in users but also continued to grow steadily, so we thought we’d show you an update!

Comments in 2025

Image 1: Line graph of monthly comments on AO3 in 2020 versus 2025. Both line graphs share small dips in February, June, and September; and peaks in July, August, and October; before sharply trending upward in December. 2020 sees an additional sharp increase in April, while 2025 shows a more typical slow rise throughout the year.

In our previous post, we observed a common pattern of slight dips in user activity in June and September. This pattern still holds true: Our users left 84,278 fewer comments in June than in May, before coming back en masse in July and August. We see a significant drop in September before cresting a suspiciously Kinktober-shaped peak in October. November sees the bustle die down one more time, before we reach record highs—crossing 5 million comments for the first time—by way of our typical end-of-year holiday increase in December.

The raw data for this graph can be found in this spreadsheet: Comments 2020/2025 (Google Sheets).

Daily page views

Image 2: Line graph showing AO3’s daily page views (in millions) starting in mid-April and ending on December 31st. Smaller spikes show higher activity on weekends than weekdays. There is one big spike to 141 million on June 1st, and two big dips to 73.7 and 72 million respectively on July 3rd and September 29th. The trend line rises slowly but steadily, crossing 110 million daily page views in mid-October.

Site traffic tends to slowly increase throughout the year with a noticeable jump in December, and we then carry that forward into the new year. Our first anomaly happens around June 1st, with several days of incredibly high page views. After consulting with our Systems volunteers, we marked this off as likely being due to a large influx of bot traffic.

On July 3rd and 4th, we ran out of rows in the database table that stores bookmarks, so we had to move them to a larger table that can hold them all! This made it so you can once again add your own bookmarks to the 647 million we already had before then. The recovery after this outage is a little higher than normal, possibly due to an influx of users downloading works to tide themselves over any future outages.

On September 29th, we had to take some planned downtime to implement an update to collections—Collection owners can now use up to ten tags of any type to describe their collection, making it easier to find collections featuring the fandoms, relationships, tropes, and other topics you enjoy.

The raw data for this graph can be found in this spreadsheet: Daily page views 2025 (Google Sheets).

Site traffic throughout a typical week

Image 3: Line graph of daily page views. A subsection of the above graph, more clearly showing the ebb and flow of traffic on the archive throughout the calendar week. There are five clear peaks on every weekend with the apex on Sunday. Thursday and Friday are where traffic dips to its lowest.

If we zoom in a little, we can clearly see that weekends are most of our users’ favourite time to engage with fanworks. Some may wonder about the peaks seeming to run over into Monday—our systems run in UTC and much of our traffic comes from later timezones. More North and South Americans reading late at night on Saturday and Sunday equals peaks on Sunday and Monday!

The raw data for this graph can be found in this spreadsheet: Daily page views August 2025 (Google Sheets).

New Year’s Eve by the minute

Image 4: Line graph of requests received by our servers between 9:00 UTC on December 31st 2025 and 9:00 UTC on January 1st 2026. Requests start to rise from ~550K at 12:00 UTC, peaking at nearly 800K at 17:30 UTC before slowly decreasing back down to ~650K. Sharp, sudden drops are noticeable at 16:00 UTC, 23:00 UTC, and 5:00 UTC, with smaller drops at 0:00 UTC and 6:00 UTC.

The delayed effect described in the previous section is especially noticeable on New Year’s Eve. We receive sudden, hourly drops in requests to our servers as users in different timezones pause their reading to ring in the new year. At 16:00 UTC, 47 thousand users in UTC+8 promptly went offline before coming back in force half an hour later, giving us our first noticeable drop. The yearline swept across the globe with minor dips on each hour, before UTC+1 dropped us by a whole 50 thousand requests and UTC followed with just 43 thousand requests. By far the most severe dip occurs when UTC-5 entered 2026, with over 80 thousand fewer requests—compared to UTC-8, which only dropped us by 30 thousand requests.

The raw data for this graph can be found in this spreadsheet: New Year’s Eve by the minute (Google Sheets).

Site traffic over the years

Image 5: Bar chart showing weekly traffic during the last week of November on AO3 from 2012 to 2025. Large jumps are noticeable between 2019 and 2020, 2022 and 2023, and 2024 and 2025.

To round things off, let’s have a look back through time!

We had a big jump in users this year—November 2025 saw over 146.6 million weekly page views more than the previous November. At first glance this is significantly higher than the 129 million increase we experienced from 2019 to 2020, but this is only 22% growth over the previous year as opposed to 52% because our baseline looks completely different.

We are excited to see where 2026 takes us, and it looks like we're already starting off strong! In the first week of the year we amassed a record high of 879 million page views, a significant jump up from 816 million the week before and averaging out to ~125 million page views a day. We look forward to breaking more records with you.

The raw data for this graph can be found in this spreadsheet: Weekly Traffic 2012-2025 (Google Sheets).

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, OTW Legal Advocacy, and Transformative Works and Cultures. We are a fan-run, donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Last November we asked the community to submit questions to our OTW volunteers in celebration of International Volunteer Day. In this series of posts we will spotlight some of our committees' responses.

The Support committee is the first point of contact for users of the Archive of Our Own (AO3) when they encounter issues, have questions, or want to submit feedback or feature requests. Internally at the OTW, Support collaborates with other committees frequently, forwarding relevant questions and information to them, or consulting them on specific topics. Besides answering tickets, they also handle several other tasks, like maintaining the AO3 Known Issues page or assisting with testing bug fixes and new features on AO3.

We asked the Support committee for replies to your questions, and received a lot of feedback! Below you can find a selection of their answers:

Support Committee Specific Question

How is Fannish Next of Kin enacted after one of the parties involved in the agreement passes away?

Committee answer:
After a creator with a Fannish Next-of-Kin passes away, the FNOK can contact us and the fannish next-of-kin agreement is activated. We will update the email associated with the account to match the address provided by your next-of-kin. Your next-of-kin will then be able to reset the password through the normal "Forgot password" process. Control will then be fully transferred to your FNOK. Please see our Fannish Next-of-Kin FAQ for more information.

General Questions

How many hours a week do you spend on your OTW volunteer work?

• I try to focus more on meeting the expected number of tickets over how many hours I spend working in a week but I think I do hit the ten hours per week that I signed up for. (Louie)
• Not super sure, but definitely a lot! I should probably try and time it at some point to check. I'd say over 15 hours, and that's me low-balling it. (Mille K)

How do you manage your volunteer time, and do you do the same thing every day like with a day job?

• First, I catch up on our internal chat tool; then I work on any of my Support tickets that need something done; and then I beta tickets from other Support volunteers, interspersing it with a few tickets of my own. If there is something specific that needs to be done by a Chair Assistant or I'm working on a project, then that comes before betas. (Jennifer)
• Chaos! It really depends on the rest of my schedule for the day, and my energy levels. I prioritize urgent tasks as much as possible. (Kyrie)

What's your favorite part about volunteering at the OTW?

• It sounds cliche I know, but helping others. And the volunteering environment is great, everyone's just so nice! :D (Wtchmn23)
• Answering user's tickets and mentoring saltlings (new Support volunteers) (Jennifer)

What's the aspect of volunteer work with the OTW that you most wish more people knew about?

• Just that the number of tickets compared to the number of people (and the time they are able to spend on it) means that some tickets either slip through the cracks or have other reasons they're not responded to in a "timely" manner (PK)
• That despite the fact that we all lead busy lives, the amount of passion people put into doing all they reasonably can for the OTW, our projects, our users, and our fellow volunteers is staggering. Oh and looking at other Support volunteers answers... that we are not paid xD This is not our only job and we're definitely not available 24/7! (Kyrie)
• That unlike many other Support forms out there on the internet, there are real humans on the other side. I love helping people, but it’s hard to keep your spirits up when the folks you volunteer for just swear at you. (Paula)

What does a typical day as an OTW volunteer looks like for you?

• My standard daily routine is: check our ticketing system to see if any tickets have been proofread (betaed) by another volunteer, then check our internal chat tool for key messages and replies. After that, I'll go back to our ticketing system to work on open tickets and find some new ones. Before logging off, I ask senior salts to look up user information I need for my tickets on our internal chat tool for the next day. Newer folks don’t get access to that information right away. (ZZ)
• First, I do some backreading of the messages in channels, check out the odd tickets that were mentioned or documents (like the opportunity to submit answers for this Q&A). Then, I will do some tickets. I start by sending out all my tickets that have been betaed, and then I get my hands on new ones. I'd like to start from later tickets and there's usually a date of where I am now and I start from there. At last I try to do some betas. (Wtchmn23)

What is your favorite animal? Alternatively, do you have a favorite breed of cat/dog?

• Today, the ADHD says dragonflies. Butterflies and moths also commonly come up. (Sam)
• I like finches and birds in general though they also scare me a lot. (ChangYan)

Do you enjoy reading fanfic? If so, what's your favorite work on AO3?

• Very much so, although I'd have trouble picking one single "favorite". The one I've probably recommended the most is "Don't Go", which is in the She-Ra fandom, and was actually written by the creator under an alias. (PK)
• I think my fave is a work called Love Is (Not) A Battlefield, Or: Gay Panic! At the BB Lounge, which is a fantastic Ya Boy Kongming! work. It's just extremely cute and sweet, and funny! And very true to canon. (Mille K)

Do you write any fanfic yourself? What do you enjoy about it?

• Yes. I enjoy being creative and hearing from my readers that my work brings them joy (or sadness, sometimes you've got to write the angst) (Anren)
• I do dabble in writing, but translation is my true love and calling. Ann Goldstein says "translating can be like lining up unruly toddlers who have their own sense of order," and nothing excites me more than an intellectual puzzle of trying to pin down the exact right word. (Liv)

What fandoms are you (currently) in?

• Batman! It's funny cause I don't really know much about canon I just piece together canon from what I read. (killiane)
• Woo, I am in a lot now. Mainly F1 RPF, sometimes code geass, or quanzhigaoshou (Sorry I don't know the exact english name) My bookmarks show that I was really into Star Trek a couple years ago. (Ziting)

Do you feel glad or proud to see fanfiction in your mother tongue?

• This question is more challenging than the rest for me, because I have very complicated feelings about Vietnamese fandom on AO3 lol. I rarely read Vietnamese fic on AO3, but in 2024 while I was hyperactive in a Vietnamese survival show fandom, during the period of three months I:
  1. translated around 600-800 Vietnamese tags,
  2. published multiple fanworks in Vietnamese and English,
  3. created a whole fanblog (it now has more than 2 thousands followers lmao) to promote AO3 to Vietnamese fans,
  4. indirectly (allegedly) skyrocketed the amount of Vietnamese Support tickets as a result, oops 😂
  One year later, looking at the current Vietnamese fanworks stat on AO3, I'm quite fond of the whole journey despite the occasional hiccups I encountered. (Anh Pham)
• Years ago when I first discovered fandom, the English community was way bigger than the Chinese one, at least for my ship. So I hung out on Tumblr and AO3, read a lot of amazing and frankly life-changing fics, commented and made rec lists and made friends with people from all over the world. It was one of the best things that happened to me and I wouldn't change it for anything. In 2021, however, we had a renaissance in Chinese fandom. And let me tell you, being able to read and write and participate in fests in your native language is like an epiphany. Is this something y'all have been able to enjoy all the time? Jealousy does not begin to describe how I feel. No more fumbling, no more worrying, I can be as unhinged as I want. Eventually we became good friends in real life, too. We call each other nicknames and meet up several times a year. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can compare to this. (Liv)

Thanks so much to every volunteer who took the time to answer!

(For more answers from Support volunteers, check out this work on AO3, where we'll collect additional replies to each question!)

The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, OTW Legal Advocacy, and Transformative Works and Cultures. We are a fan-run, donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.