SubscribeIn reading some of the feedback to Om's post, I've seen LiveJournalers worried that we're going to turn around and start charging, close the LiveJournal source, own the content on LiveJournals, force the users to use TypePad/Movable Type and plaster their sites with advertisements. (We're not going to do this).(God, I love LJ drama.)
What is your justification of "~12% + X%= Y%" = "~12% + 83%= 95%" ∴ X=83 and Y=95?
LiveJournal has been ambivalent in the past to advertising. In [link here]some parts of the site[/link here], they have indicated that they would never run advertising. In [link here]other parts[/link], they have indicated that advertising hasn't been used simply because it wasn't deemed necessary, and annoyed the LiveJournal owners. That ambivalence has been resolved by the decision to establish a [link here]new tier[/link] of service, which provides some features previously only available to paid users to free users, provided that they agree to run advertising. The impact of this is under debate, as [link to insomnia_lj's page]some people[/link] predict this will mean that most free users of LiveJournal will see these ads, while [link to opposing view]others[/link] think the amount of LJ users that opt in will be low, and thus the number of viewers of advertising will be commensurately low.Of course, if it were me, I'd skip the "point/counterpoint" at the end, unless someone said some pretty kick-ass stuff, but I know some MeFi users like the multiple-viewpoints in addition to dry facts stuff, so that would be for them.
Certainly, all people who opt for ads will see them, as will all free users of the site who visit those users pages. That's approximately 95% of the total membership. Perhaps a tad more.Also:
Paid users for LJ are the only ones who aren't going to see ads, right?So, um. "No." Here, I'll use crayon:
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1> When you give potentially hundreds of thousands of people access to many of the paid features, you are putting a much greater server burden on those features... many of which don't work reliably even now. For instance, one of the paid features that are planned for ad-sponsored accounts are directory searches, but simple directory searches such as find all users in Little Rock Arkansas interested in football often take minutes, with slow image loading.
Likewise, you can expect that images hosted on LJ will take longer to load, and that other paid features will potentially lag more. It's quite possible that server load on these kinds of paid features will double in short order. That could easily make the difference between something not working all that well and something not working at all.
2> Paid features that you might currently take for granted, such as the ability to link to your LJ-hosted images on sites other than LJ, might be taken away in the future because they are being made available to anyone willing to accept ads on their journals. Potentially, people can use LJ's image service to host a full gigabyte of images without even having an active account. This free, unpaid for service would be publically available to all spammers, adult site owners, pedophiles, and basically anyone on the Internet who wants free, anonymous image hosting. This could greatly increase the burden on the image hosting service, and could also lead to censorship, as LiveJournal users who post images intended for a select group of LiveJournal users find their pictures deleted or accounts flagged for hosting images, in the same way that users of many other image hosting sites are.
3> While free users don't have to view ads on their journals, they *WILL* have to view ads on the journals of ad-sponsored accounts. The truth is, free users will routinely be exposed to ads on LiveJournal.
4> LiveJournal is targeting these ads based on the interests listed by users, but the use of this kind of data for delivering ads is prone to considerable error. You could be interested in vegetarianism and restaurants and get ads for "Outback Steakhouse". You could be interested in "Iraq" and "nonviolence" and get Army recruitment ads. Is this really what you want, or what you want to expose your friends to?
5> SixApart says that they will not give away personal information except "with our service providers and vendors in connection with the operation of the service and our business, where we think it is appropriate . . . or if the business is being sold or reorganized." How is this in any way a promise to protect our personal information at all, either now or in the future? Isn't providing a user's interests to an advertiser giving away personal (and often valuable) information, if not specifically about that user, then at least in aggregate? Can a user "opt out" of providing their personal or aggregate information in any form that might eventually be used by advertisers, data miners, or other unwanted entities?
6> If you get rid of rules against ads, expect ads on many other journals. In fact, SixApart has already mentioned that there are plans for encouraging an ad-driven plan for paid users, too. (Some people will do anything for a few extra user pics, I guess.)
7> If you're a paid user, you won't see whether or not there is an ad on any given LiveJournal site, but if you link others to that site, they'll see it. Do you really want to do that?
8> It further balkanizes and diminishes the site's sense of community. LiveJournal is rapidly becoming a closed, gated community of "friends only" journals. Creating a whole community of ad-supporting users would cause further balkanization and seperation, with some users and communities choosing not to associate with ad-supporting users.
9> It sets a bad precident. SixApart previously agreed to "avoid banner advertisements" because LiveJournals existing business model made them "unnecessary." We must ask them this... why did they change this policy? What prevents them from changing any other supposed "principles" they hold in the future? What new circumstances exist which makes this policy absolutely necessary for LiveJournal users, to such an extent that SixApart can no longer avoid serving us ads?
10> It's potentially bad for business. I was there when LiveJournal hosted banner ads before briefly, back when the site only had about 15,000 members. While the banner ads did raise a *VERY* small amount of money (we're talking only a few bucks...) they also decreased site growth by approximately 30%. People opted to use other services, because their first impression of LiveJournal was seeing someone's site with a banner ad on it. LiveJournal's history of success is based upon a "free, but paid" business model, specifically intended to promote growth, because site growth allows the site to scale and for overhead to decrease, allowing LiveJournal to spend more of its money on doing what you really want them to do -- improving the site. Adding a large influx of business reps, marketing personnel, and ad execs does very little to improve your LiveJournal experience, and often creates a self-perpetuating bureaucracy... so why would you want to pay for it? Remember, LiveJournal is *still* a pre-IPO startup that could go bust. Shouldn't you desperately want them to be lean, mean, and focused on profitability instead?
11> It simply isn't necessary, and SixApart has done nothing to show that there is any need to violate their pledge to "avoid banner ads". In fact, I suspect that SixApart's new ad scheme is largely a waste of money. According to LiveJournal's own statistics, there are currently only 1,301,145 users who have updated in the past 30 days. These users are only about 8% of the total user base, but they probably make up over 90% of the site's traffic. If you subtract paid users from this total, you're left with about 1,000,000 users as a viable target market for ad-supported journals. Of that total, it would be optimistic if one-in-eight of those users opted in for ads, or approximately 150,000 users, whose journals are soon going to be a helluva lot less popular with other LJ users in the future. How SixApart intends to use such a low number of ad-bearing accounts to reliably pay the salaries of the third-party, tracker-installing biz people and the "ad people" that SixApart have hired who "don't necessarily understand LiveJournal users yet" is far from clear.
posted by insomnia_lj at 6:39 AM on April 19, 2006