Fans’ Complex Resistance against the Commercialisation of Fandom

The final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Allegra Rosenberg, whose interest is in fan art. This is now a big business, with fan-created fiction and fan-created imagery being provided for pay on various platforms. This is not uncontroversial, however; the fan site Archive of Our Own (AO3) has a long-standing ban against linking to for-profit sites, for instance.

But there has also been a slower commercialisation of fan content from the bottom up; this shows the increasingly normative acceptance of commercial exploitation. Fan sites for specific cultural phenomena are often run in collaboration with commercial interests, for instance, and the fan operators of such sites often profit from these fan activities.

This can also be seen in the development of a new category of slick and professionally produced fan zines, which have little to do with the grassroots, amateur-produced zines of past decades; these zines really are small business, and have at times suffered from the lack of business nous and ethics amongst the fans involved. Fans do also react against such hustle culture, however, and look down on the overt commodification of their fandom interests.

There is a distinction to be made between the financialisation of fans and the financialisation of fandom, however; the former is seen in fan conventions and the latter in the hiring of fans by commercial platforms, for instance. Even productive fans who are largely resistant to such commercialisation are gradually being drawn into such more commercial frameworks. Fans are conflicted in this, however, as they are often what stands between large media conglomerates and the outright exploitation and perversion of the media texts that they are loyally devoted to.

Fans engaging with commercialisation can thus be seen as essentially domesticating themselves: making themselves easier to exploit by mass media interests; they can make use of influencer and creator models to achieve status within their fan communities, but must also be careful not to subsume themselves into the logics of the commercial media industry. There is a need to protect the fandom gift economy.