This final chapter considers how fans are using the World Wide Web to start online fan enterprises, or, as I describe them, ‘informal enterprises’ that distribute produced artefacts as commodities. The previous two chapters have highlighted the significance of the World Wide Web for fan enterprise. The fantrepreneurs discussed in Chapter four started online shops to sell their products, giving them access to a global fan audience, and the previous chapter focused on CineTorrent, a non-profit online fan enterprise. Having identified the significance of the Web for fan enterprise, I now explore how fantrepreneurs are adopting online ‘demand and supply’ services to make informal enterprise more sustainable, but, at the same time, still operate within a formal structure that exploits their labour.

Returning to the fan enterprises discussed in Chapter four – Media Communications, Dark Publications, and FAB Press – a key feature of these is that they can be understood as formal enterprises. In using terms formal and informal, I return to the work of Lobato and Thomas (2015). For Lobato and Thomas, formal media is ‘industrially regulated’, whereas the informal ‘operate without, or in partial articulation with, regulatory oversight’ (ibid., p. 5). I adopt the term ‘formal’ to describe fan enterprises that were formed using enterprise grants and, in the case of FAB Press, were registered businesses. All of these companies can be located at Companies House, the body responsible for the registering of businesses in the UK. In this chapter, I now focus on informal enterprises.