LotRfanfiction.com

I don't really have time for this - I get too little done as is at the moment - and it is already quite late. But still, I think that this is important.

Yesterday, lotrfanfiction.com vanished all of a sudden. All that remained was a mysterious note by a Keith Mander:

LOTRFanFiction.com is now under new ownership. Whilst the site changes hands, we need to take the site offline so that we can transfer files, update the database and make sure everything is up and running correctly. We hope for the site to be back online within the next 24-hours.

Any immediate queries can be directed to Keith Mander. See you soon!

Cue panic, for me and many others, as we couldn't access the site anymore and had no hopes of backing up our reviews. Samtyr, my personal hero, somehow still could access the site and must have spent hours last night backing up reviews for me and many others! ♥

Googling the guy's name led to an interview with him, as well as his personal blog, where he talks about how he earns money by buying popular websites.

Apparently he specifically targets fannish sites, because their owners are less aware of the worth of their sites:

My approach would be to directly contact site owners who are unaware of their site’s value and who’ve never experimented with online advertising. They’re usually surprised when you contact them with an offer and this eases the negotiation process. The potential with this approach is far greater.
Using information on popular search keywords is a good starting point. I think it’s wise to concentrate on topics that are not immediately commercial in nature as you’re more likely to discover a site created out of passion, rather than for profit.

Even worse, here is what he has to say about his acquisition at his blog:

Déjà vu? LOTRFanFiction.com is a fan fiction archive, just like TwilightArchives.com (another site I snapped up a couple of months ago).

The thinking is that I can leverage the technology behind the Twilight site’s redesign to quickly rejuvenate the LOTR site. Plus, plenty of opportunities for cross promotion and integration (SSO, for example). The longer term thought is that with the combined user base, I’ll be able to quickly enter and dominate new fandoms, hopefully creating some returns.

Déjà vu? Oh yes, why do you ask? This is very much a déjà vu - of the entire Fanlib debacle. Yet another company greedy to make money from the social media boom, seeing all that potential of thousands of users only waiting to generate free content for them to make money from...
It is so obvious that he understands absolutely nothing about fandom. And his statement that he wants to "dominate new fandoms?" I'm seriously appalled at suddenly finding my main archive, my favourite archive for so many years, where I've met people and had so many great discussions, in the hands of a man who sees it simply as capital.

Today, about two hours ago, lotrfanfiction.com was back at last, with the followng news posted:

Changes at LotRFF

Hello,

My name is Keith and I'm delighted to make this very special announcement.

I've been talking with Adora for several weeks about the future of the site. We've come to an agreement where I will be taking on ownership and technical responsibilities for the site.

I can appreciate that this might surprise many of you. Rest assured that all of your stories are safe and the site will continue to exist for a long time to come.

Adora will continue to be very much involved with the site as the founder and moderator. You'll still be able to reach her using her site related e-mail address.

Adora has done an incredible job growing the community over the past 7-years and I'm super excited about helping take the site to the next stage as a team. Expect an all new design, new features and lots more over the coming month or two.

Please shoot an email to keith@lotrfanfiction.com if you spot anything that's not working on the site or if you'd like to chat!

I'll post more information about the plans real soon.

Speak to you again soon,

Keith

I posted the following reply to him - let's see if it will stay, or if it will get deleted:

I must admit that I'm rather concerned about this. You own a company that makes money from buying popular websites, which is fine - but I did not agree that my stories will earn money for the owner of this website when I signed up for the archive. I post these stories for free, so fellow fans might enjoy them - I most definitely do not want to be a user who generates free content for one of the many companies who want to make money from the social media boom.

Furthermore, I am a little concerned about the legal aspects here. Fanfiction by its nature occupies a grey zone in the copyright and IP debates, and while I do think of fanfiction as trannsformative work that fulfils the requirements of fair use, the moment you try to earn money with it, it becomes quite a different matter. The Tolkien Estate particularly is very, very protective of their copyright, and I'd hate to see our entire fandom targeted because of this.

Mostly though, regardless of the legal issue, fandom, for me and many, is a gift industry. Fandom at large has never reacted well to companies trying to make money from them. Google "Fanlib", if you want an example. That said, I do not quite see why I should create content for free which you will turn into money, especially when there are enough by-fans for-fans alternatives. I've been a vocal supporter of the Archive Of Our Own and the OTW since its planning stage, because I've always feared that something like this would happen in in our near future. I'm really sad to see it start at an archive that has become my main archive, which I've used for so many years. One of my stories is the 5th most read story of the archive, with around 68 000 hits, and I can see no reason at all why all these hits for my stories should make money for you in the future, when I've always seen my stories as a gift to fandom - not as free content for a company to turn into money.

Edited July 1:

Keith Mander is very eager to point out how he used to work for Facebook - and do you know what he himself admits is the lesson he learned there?

As a former Facebook employee and as an active user, I can certainly emphasise with your perspective on some of the ill thought out changes they've made. Interestingly, their perspective, which is also shared by Apple and others (to make it perfectly clear, I don't necessarily agree) is that users aren't always clear about what they want. An illustrative example would be the News Feed. It's now a core part of the Facebook experience and users go made whenever there's a subtle change made to it - yet, when it first launched, users revolted. Facebook stuck to their guns and it paid off. I provide this anecdote cautiously as I don't want it to be perceived that I know best by any means or that'd I take this approach. It does display the need to look at things from all angles.

Source

Now he claims that he doesn't necessarily agree that users aren't always clear about what they want - but looking at how he has handled this, and how he is still evasive in all of his answers, I would say that his actions speak louder than his words. Keith knows what is best for fandom, and that is apparently not using open source software like efiction or the AO3 code, but developing a fandom archive software from scratch, for thousands of dollars, as he says, which is apparently his reasoning for why it is alright to make money from fanfiction archives:

This, I'm sure, is the issue that causes the most concern amongst users. The site costs money to run through hosting costs and domain renewal. Moreover, I'm pledging several thousand dollars into the new revision of the site, hiring professional designers and developers. Further investment will be made into marketing efforts to encourage more engagement on the site.

Source

@RUSSANDOL: The site is being redeveloped from scratch and will no longer make any use of efiction whatsoever. It’s a great bit of software, but it uses outdated technologies and has become bloated. I assure you that the cost of redeveloping the site is very real – I only wish this wasn’t the case!

Source

Back in 2008, Keith Mander was making money with the usual annoying SEO websites which everyone who tries to google something will stumble upon sooner or later. My quick layman's explanation of SEO:

Do you know this phenomenon that, when you google something, you get sites as a result that keep repeating the phrase you googled for, but the articles themselves are terribly repetitive/obviously copied from somewhere/barely make sense? That's basically what this SEO business is about, cheating Google's algorithm by repeating phrases to get the top spots in the search results, even though there is nothing of worth on the page. These articles get outsourced to writers who write them for a couple of cents. Keith Manders talks about how he employs the same strategy in his blog back in 2008: http://www.keithmander.com/?p=243

Meanwhile, Google is of course aware of that stragegy and keeps working on their algorithms to make sure that the top search results go to websites with real information, not money-making SEO sites.

Keith Mander has now found the perfect solution for this. He no longer needs to pay writers to write articles for him, the users of the fanfic archives he buys do all of that for free. And it's content that's far more valuable than the typical SEO articles, because it is 'genuine' content, which gets recognized as such by Google. He needs to do nothing - the users of his website keep generating valuable content and traffic for him, while he earns money from ads.

Moreover, there is also a podcast with Keith Mander available:

Keith could have simply enjoyed a nice career at Google or Facebook, where he has spent the last 4 years. After having learned a lot about online advertising in these companies though, he came to the conclusion that it was time for him to develop his side projects into his own startup.

"He is taking care of a portfolio of websites that are bringing him money through advertising; he is now able to work and live from whereever he wants, and that's great."

"I'm interested in building a portfolio of small, niche websites, and then monetizing them through basic online advertising, through the classic exchanges and networks, AdSense being the kind of main one at the moment. So I look to buy undervalued websites, sites that haven't been updated in a while, are poorly monetized, are kind of in disrepair, so a way of looking at it is kind of real estate, like houses that are undervalued, and then rejuvenating it, so improving the design, adding more content, improving the monetization, and then looking to either sell it, or rent it out through advertising. It's much like the real estate model, people buying properties and developing them, and adding value and hoping to reprofit, but I'm doing it in the virtual world." (my transcription)

Meanwhile, at LotRfanfiction.com, Adora, the former owner, claims that she talked it all through with Keith, that she has come to know him well, and that... apparently he is doing all this rejuvenating out of the goodness of his heart?

That doesn't necessarily mean there are any intentions to turn it into a cash cow. Indeed, with the existing cost of the server, in addition to expense involved in making improvements in the first place, this is not and will never be a hugely profitable enterprise. He knows that... and if his only interest was making money, he wouldn't be doing it with a niche site based on a very specific interest. That's not how you turn over a high-level profit.

Source

Something does not quite add up there.

Meanwhile, more and more authors are pulling out of LotRfanfiction.com, though so far, Keith Mander and Adora ignore all requests from users to delete their accounts. (Of course - a high number of users and hits is how Keith Mander makes money with sites.)

I am nevertheless very glad to see that the news spread that quickly through fandom. And I have had a few very busy days, where I have done pretty much nothing after work but to spend every minute until I go to bed in setting up a new archive. It is based on the efiction code as well, is all inclusive when it comes to all sorts, genres, ratings etc. of Tolkien fic, and is working well so far - none of my lovely guinea pigs fellow fans made it crash. There are a couple of minor bugs I still want to fix before I make the link public, but I hope to be able to do that this weekend.

It might never become as big or as popular as LotRfanfiction.com, but it will be an alternative for those of us who are looking for a self-upload, all-inclusive archive besides the various other Tolkien archives, or the multi-fandom ones like the AO3. :)

ETA: And here is a report on this fiasco at the OTW blog: http://transformativeworks.org/lotr-and-twilight-fan-fiction-archives-bought-profit

Entry originally posted to DW: http://esteliel.dreamwidth.org/407809.html (comments). Comments are welcome in either place.