Who Pays the Piper?

Meta
Title:	Who Pays the Piper
Creator:	Lyrastar
Date(s):	2007
Medium:	print, CD
Fandom:	Star Trek: TOS
Topic:	Star Trek: TOS, Kirk/Spock, web hosting
External Links:
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Who Pays the Piper? is an article by Lyrastar in Legacy #3.

The topic: Is fan fiction on the internet really free? And if it isn't, who pays for it? This article is a 2007 view.

Excerpt

“It’s free!” says Farfalla of Web fiction. For the reader, by and large, it is. And so it has been for mailing lists and newsgroups delivering one story at a time for the reader to either collect periodically or shuffle through a chaotic backlog of text messages. But the luxury of having a fixed K/S site where the stories can be indexed, easily found, reorganized at will, and presented in an inviting format is typically something someone has had to pay for. So how has K/S online been supported if not by buyers recompensing a portion of the cost?

The largest historical repository of K/S, Trekiverse, has run almost solely off of space donated—be it knowingly or unknowingly—by the owners of said space. At the start up of Trekiverse, a couple founders bought the domain names while server space was...uh...borrowed from various institutional computers to which maintainers had access. Finally, SlashCity donated hosting space—and thus a stable location for the stories—a profoundly generous decision that speaks to the importance of this archive to so many.

For several years ending in 2003, kardasi.com had a PayPal donation button on the site and a reminder to visitors that voluntary financial support of the hosting costs would be appreciated. However, this was deemed a violation of PayPal’s terms of service and had to be discontinued. A large site with much traffic, especially at the time of the Slash Advent Calendar and the release of a new issue of Side by Side, voluntary contributions were still accepted on a less formal “pass the cyber-hat” type basis. So far there has been no attempt to recoup Web hosting costs directly from each visitor as a condition to K/S site access, an interesting difference in the paying for fan fiction discussions.

As time went by and bandwidth costs dropped significantly in the early 2000s, it became less of an issue. Newer K/S specific archives such as thyla.com and ksarchive.com have the cost borne by the maintainers as a gift to the K/S community. So also is the case with most of the single author or similarly low traffic Web sites, which currently and typically cost less than $200 USD per year to keep up. Similarly, though not so reliably, some authors have used free hosting such as Tripod or Geocities where the host is compensated through advertising not under the user’s control. The problem with these has been the old, “You get what you pay for” adage. Aside from the ads being annoying and the pages often slow, the host has almost no obligation to the user, and the site could be taken down at any time.