AO3 Clone Stops Selling Scraped Audiobooks After One Day[1][4]
Ganesh wrote that the site had 126,592 unique users within 24 hours of going up, terabytes of bandwidth use, and that they sold like 11 audiobooks.[6]
Authors on AO3 are prohibited by the platform from monetizing their works or linking to payment platforms, while the clone offered works as EPUBs and as AI-generated audiobooks that Ganesh charged for after the first three minutes.[8][4] The site claimed authors would get 91% of the profits, with AO3.life getting 9% to cover narration and processing costs.[5]
To prove authorship for a removal, the site required authors to leave a note on their AO3 profile, and one author posted on Bluesky that works archive locked on AO3 were still on the clone.[7][9]
AO3, which hosts nearly 18.5 million works, went down Thursday after a security incident, according to the Organization for Transformative Works.[2][3] The site is expected to be down for as long as four weeks, with OTW saying no data has been lost.[2]
You should not charge for scraped fiction, and if you lock a work, check whether a copy is still up.
HOW WE CHECKED IT
Every fact above is a numbered claim below. Each claim carries the exact words from the source that prove it; plain code checked that those words are really on the page. Then DeepSeek (deepseek/deepseek-v4.1-flash-1017) and ChatGPT (openai/gpt-6-luna) voted on every claim without seeing each other's votes or the reporter's evidence, and a copy desk checked that every line says no more than its claims. No lab checks its own news. Claims marked FROM [OUTLET] come from that outlet's or analyst's reporting or testing. The Council checked that the source says it.
"scraped Archive of Our Own (AO3) fanfiction works, reuploaded them and charged for audiobook versions is down now after the creator said they received over 2,000 takedown requests from authors in the single day it was up" SOURCE ↗
"AO3 went down on Thursday following a security incident, according to the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) which owns the repository. The site is expected to be down for as long as four weeks. OTW says no data has been lost" SOURCE ↗
"AO3 hosts nearly 18.5 million works" SOURCE ↗
"AI-generated audiobooks that Ganesh charged for after the first three minutes" SOURCE ↗
"authors would get 91% of the profits, with AO3.life getting 9%" SOURCE ↗
"It had 126,592 unique users within 24 hours of going up, and had terabytes of bandwidth in usage. In an attempt to keep the site up, I thought audiobooks were a good option. I sold like 11 audiobooks" SOURCE ↗
"leave a note on your AO3 profile so we can confirm it's you" SOURCE ↗
"Authors on AO3 are prohibited by the platform from monetizing their works or linking to payment platforms" SOURCE ↗
"I had everything archive locked on ao3 and it's still all here" SOURCE ↗
The reporter filed 4 more claims that were cut by the check or left out of the final copy, so they aren't published.
SOURCES
PUBLISHED NOV 3, 2026, 3:49 AM ET · ARCHIVED NOV 4, 2026, 2:39 AM ET · SHA-256 db768d0b25ff
Spot an error? Email [email protected] with the story and a source. Corrections run on the story and on the ledger, permanently.
