Despite fanfiction being some of the most popular “pull-to-publish” phenomena of the 2010s, these books — "Fifty Shades of Grey," which was once a Twilight fic or the After series which was inspired by One Direction — were also widely ridiculed and dismissed as soft “women’s fiction.” But in the 2020s, a new wave of books penned by authors with roots in fanfiction are challenging those perceptions, including "Manacled", a hugely-popular Draco/Hermione fanfic which will be adapted into an original novel by author SenLinYu in 2025. The popularity of fics in nascent communities like BookTok have pushed discussions of what the boundaries between fanfic communities and the publishing industry should be.
AO3 wasn’t formed due to monetization of fanfic, it was formed because of censorship on other platforms.