no_lj_ads: More ads on the front page biz.

Skittish Eclipse (

foxfirefey) wrote in

no_lj_ads,
@ 2007-01-27 02:55:00

Entry tags:

ad implementation, staff talking

More ads on the front page biz.
Not many people noticed the ads on news on the post around when they were introduced, but a quite a few have been noticing the new front page ads on the latest news post.

brad posts about being against ads on the front page, as well. But, as we all know, there are some issues you just can't win.

(Post a new comment)

	insomnia 2007-01-27 11:55 am UTC (link)
	I left a long comment to him about how ironic it is that he of all people is complaining about LJ's slow bleeding, since he was the one who opted in to it. I also appended the story of The Goose Who Laid the Golden Eggs to the post, as it seemed appropriate. I don't really expect he'll unscreen the post, but at least he should get the point. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	ciaran_h 2007-01-27 03:51 pm UTC (link)
	He didn't really have much of a choice... LJ was sucking up his time and energy when he wanted to work on other things. It wasn't that he wanted to get rich off of selling LJ. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

uniquewonders
2007-01-27 04:53 pm UTC (link)

Honest question: did trying to keep his focus on development and stuff mean that LJ had to be sold? Could there have been management changes or some sort of reorganization or is that completely unrealistic? Anyway, no point in dwelling on what you can't change, imo.

One of the points, if I remember well, is that he/they/LJ wanted to be able to do more, to grow bigger and that required more money, more employees, etc. Well, they did but at what price?

(Reply to this) (Parent)

insomnia
2007-01-27 04:55 pm UTC (link)

He had to sell LJ because it was sucking up his time and energy? I just don't believe it. It's still routinely requiring 10 hour working days.

Brad had similar arguments about LJ from the first day I worked with him, back in 2000. The problem wasn't that it sucked up his time. The problem was that:

1> He couldn't let go and delegate.
2> He didn't play well with others, pissing off the great majority of open source developers who came forward to help.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	livredor 2007-01-28 08:28 pm UTC (link)
	Honestly, I'm not sure how productive it is at this point to have a go at Brad. I don't deny that he has his faults, but as you point out yourself he doesn't really have much power these days. And you might well believe that he should have taken a different course from selling LJ, but it happened the way it did and we can't go back now. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	ex_shattered767 2007-01-28 03:44 am UTC (link)
	He did - I skimmed it before leaving my own comment. (Reply to this) (Parent)

jesspark
2007-01-27 12:09 pm UTC (link)

That's so sad. On the one hand, I'm pleased that Brad still gives a crap about LiveJournal... but, on the other hand, I wish there wasn't reason for that post to prove it.

I don't know. I'm still upset at the way LJ's been handled--well, I was going to say "lately," when, really, it's more like "a while," but I'm finding myself caring less and less. Yeah, I still have an investment in the site -- after coming up on six years and just over four thousand entries, that's natural -- but I don't have a lot of fight left anymore when it comes to "defending" this place. It's obviously not doing any good; as predicted, despite the repeated assurances from TPTB, the camel's taking over the tent.

I still post every day, but I've become so discouraged by all the drama and BS that it's put a bad taste in my mouth and I'm not as enthusiastic about LJ as I was even six months ago. Instead of thinking, "Wow, I have to post this to LJ!", it's more like, "Oh, I guess I should update," and, oftentimes, that winds up being a one- or two-liner private entry: a sort of Post-It note about my day rather than the detailed, lengthy posts of yesteryear.

Based on the entries on my friends page decreasing, both in number and length -- and those that are left griping about how LJ's gotten "boring" lately -- I'm probably not the only one feeling this way, and my friends list has always been composed of pretty dedicated LJers. It's not a good sign. Will other users start feeling similarly, and will such a great, vibrant community eventually go out with a whimper of apathy?

...wow, that was pretty emo and pointless. I blame the early hour; my brain is still asleep. =)

(Reply to this) (Thread)

insomnia
2007-01-27 12:30 pm UTC (link)

"Based on the entries on my friends page decreasing, both in number and length -- and those that are left griping about how LJ's gotten "boring" lately -- I'm probably not the only one feeling this way, and my friends list has always been composed of pretty dedicated LJers. It's not a good sign. Will other users start feeling similarly, and will such a great, vibrant community eventually go out with a whimper of apathy?"

What you describe is exactly the kind of symptoms I predicted would happen as a result of LJ's gradual shrinking of regular users. This shrinking is probably even more pronounced for people like you who have a lot of old users on your friends list, and who probably don't add new users to your list at a rate high enough to make up for older accounts going inactive / less active over time.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	elfwreck 2007-01-27 03:13 pm UTC (link)
	I still post (not as much as I used to, but that's job-related, not LJ-politics-related), still read... but I no longer encourage people to get LJ accounts & join me here. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	uniquewonders 2007-01-27 04:39 pm UTC (link)
	Same here. I would never send an invite or pimp LJ in any way. And I would never encourage anyone to upgrade to a paid account. I used to. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	smashingstars 2007-01-27 10:34 pm UTC (link)
	I half-heartedly encouraged some people on a Usenet newsgroup to try out LJ in an effort to create a group that could be moderated, and the few who cared to check into it said that if they had to see ads they might as well use Yahoo groups instead. Yeah, that's anecdotal, but I thought it was interesting. (Reply to this) (Parent)

smashingstars
2007-01-27 10:29 pm UTC (link)

Nah, I don't think it's emo and pointless. I've noticed the exact things you have regarding friends' entries and such.

Something else I've noticed is that the signal-to-noise ratio has changed. People who contributed important information or, essentially, took their blog somewhat seriously got frustrated and stopped posting as much. A few stopped posting at all. Some days it seems like all that's left are the people who came to LJ to cause drama, flame, etc. I've quit about 10 (non-drama) communities in the past month because they no longer offer anything but flames, and because the moderators don't care enough to moderate anymore. It's very similar to what happened on Usenet when people got bored with it. The crazies on Usenet who post tinfoil theories and who stalk people that upset them back in '96 almost equal those left behind who contribute now. I'm scared to death that's going to happen on LJ.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	schnee 2007-01-27 01:25 pm UTC (link)
	How much decision-making power does Brad still have, anyway? (Reply to this) (Thread)

	insomnia 2007-01-27 04:56 pm UTC (link)
	Hardly any when it comes to business decisions. It's not his company. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	schnee 2007-01-27 05:41 pm UTC (link)
	noddles :/ (Reply to this) (Parent)

	uniquewonders 2007-01-27 02:33 pm UTC (link)
	If I decide not to renew my account (and I've just switched from undecided to 65% against renewing), I think I'll realize this had been the clincher. It doesn't affect me at all but, to me, LJ has now become one of those sites with ads and I don't wanna support it. I've just gotta fight against layout addiction. :) (Reply to this) (Thread)

matgb
2007-01-27 03:50 pm UTC (link)

I've just gotta fight against layout addiction.

Trust me on this one, Wordpress layout theming is just as addictive, and given WP's popularity, is a hobby you could actually make money at. I'm very sold on switching everything to Wordpress now, and now I'm online at my new place I can start catching up on stuff...

(theme Sandbox is my current favourite, it's like Expressive, but more flexible)

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	uniquewonders 2007-01-27 04:36 pm UTC (link)
	The problem is that my lj is closely related to fandom - that's why I created it really - so unless 80% of my flist moves elsewhere, I'm stuck here. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

turloughishere
2007-01-27 05:15 pm UTC (link)

I'm in the same situation. I created my journal because of fandom and fandom is the (almost) sole reason I use it, so moving somewhere else isn't an option for me. The more so since my fandom is one of those that's been concentrated to LJ since the beginning and have almost zero presence anywhere else (no central archive(s) at all, for example).

I might also add that so far I haven't noticed any lessening in activity in my flist. On the contrary, the fandom is actually on an upswing for the first time in several years.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

uniquewonders
2007-01-27 05:29 pm UTC (link)

"I might also add that so far I haven't noticed any lessening in activity in my flist."

Same thing in my corner of the fandomverse. I don't think fandom will be moving anytime soon. And a good part of us are still paid (not to say perm) users and impressive gift givers. That being said, I've noticed an increasing amount of grouchy comments when it came to LJ. If something was good enough to justify switching to a new host I think people would seriously consider it. I wouldn't have said that a couple of years ago.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

matgb
2007-01-27 05:45 pm UTC (link)

So if we can get

lj2wordpress to offer all the functionality of LJ, with the greater flexibility of Wp, and full integration with other services (like LJ and clones), you'd consider it?

There's no reason why you can't do most stuff off site on your own server, and still have it on LJ and comment on those that remain. Hopefully, we can get it to work seamlessly, and with so many advantages.

Hopefully. I need to keep catching up with stuff and see where we're at though.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

uniquewonders
2007-01-27 05:51 pm UTC (link)

"There's no reason why you can't do most stuff off site on your own server, and still have it on LJ and comment on those that remain. Hopefully, we can get it to work seamlessly, and with so many advantages."

No, that won't do (if I understood what you said correctly). What is interesting is being part of communities and it means being in the same place as everybody else. That's what fandom is fundamentally about. If we can have that somewhere else then we'd consider moving.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

matgb
2007-01-27 06:00 pm UTC (link)

Communities no problem at all. In fact, people''l be able to log in at the community site with their LJ id, post and comment without an issue, and (hopefully) use all their userpics. So those that leave can leave, and those that don't jump immediately can test the waters first.

Your site can have as many journals on it as you wish, and alternately we can help with set up, etc.

Communities with their own domains will, I hope, be better medium to long term anyway, and they should fully integrate both ways.

(call this market research; attracting fandom generally to the idea of switching will be one of my big projects when we're ready, so asking this sort of thing and figuring out what you want, why and how it can be done better elsewhere is all part of the same thing)

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

uniquewonders
2007-01-27 06:10 pm UTC (link)

"people'll be able to log in at the community site with their LJ id"

Do you have to log in every time? Or is it just LJ users or what?

Who owns the comm? How is it managed? And the most important point: can it be free? (I doubt that)

Figuring out what we want is easy. We want what we have here: community and friends posts on your friends page, easy commenting, easy posting, memories and tags, privacy. There's a reason why we love LJ: it makes everything simple and easy and immediately accessible. (well, most of the time ;-))

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

matgb
2007-01-27 06:21 pm UTC (link)

Do you have to log in every time? Or is it just LJ users or what?

You can choose whether to be remembered, same as for LJ, but generally I've stayed logged in from day to day on sites I already log in using OpenID.

Who owns the comm?
Depends on how it's hosted, but if self hosted, the initial creator.

How is it managed?
Admin panel, there's a role manager system that means the principle admin (creator of comm) can set priviledges to others, and what each person can/can't do will be more flexible than LJ currently allows.

And the most important point: can it be free? (I doubt that)

I think there's a way it can be, for basic level stuff, yes; need to discuss the idea with

foxfirefey first to see if it's even viable, but yes, I think it can be. Obviously, paid versions would be better.

But the ideal is it's hosted on it's own domain, so someone would have to pay, but given the amount of money fandom throws at at LJ already, the costs of self hosting are minimal these days.

Figuring out what we want is easy. We want what we have here: community and friends posts on your friends page, easy commenting, easy posting, memories and tags, privacy. There's a reason why we love LJ: it makes everything simple and easy and immediately accessible. (well, most of the time ;-))

The only thing I'm unsure about is friends pages; hopefully they'll get the open protocol for cross integrating Vox with privacy settings onto LJ, and if they do then we're good, but the other way around should be fine.

Everything else is there, I think, except memories, but there are a few bookmarking sites that could probably be integrated (TBH, I never use memories much, so I hadn't thought about them)

Privacy is one of the objectives, anyway.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	foxfirefey 2007-01-27 10:17 pm UTC (link)
	On the contrary, the fandom is actually on an upswing for the first time in several years.. Interesting! So is that just your particular fandom or fandom as a whole? (Curious is me!) (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

turloughishere
2007-01-27 10:50 pm UTC (link)

Well, I'm pretty monofandomish so I don't know from personal experience what's going on in other fandoms, but from the impressions I get from multifandomish people on my flist and from following

metafandom I would say that taken as a whole fandom on LJ is much the same today as it was a year or two ago, neither larger nor smaller. What has happened of course is that some individual fandoms have flourished enormously - SGA and Supernatural are the two behemots but Doctor Who has been growing a lot over the last year and so has the spinoff Torchwood - and that others have waned - Buffy, Harry Potter a little, and others I probably don't know about.

Whenever there is a problem with access etc you get some people who grumble about LJ just concentrating on adding shiny new gadgets and not making sure that the basic infrastructure works, but in general day-to-day discussions you seldom hear anything either positive or negative. A large part of my flist has either paid or permanent accounts and the few times anyone with a basic account asks about plus you either get people regaling the askee with horror stories about how the ads will mess up their layout (nice layouts are very important for many in fandom) and even outright offers to pay for a paid account. Of course the only policy I have when it comes to adding and deleting people from my flist is that I won't accept plus accounts so my experience is rather slanted when it comes to this.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

blktauna
2007-01-28 03:58 pm UTC (link)

The thing that I interject is that some people in fandom are so invested in Lj that any grumbling or complaint about how there isn't the privacy you think there is, or that posting your fiction in public communities makes it serchable by TPTB that are now _on_ LJ, or that TPTB do not in any way think your fanfic comm is free advertising... get you shouted at.

I don't like having my fannish stuff in the hands of some Corp who I do not trust to serve my privacy needs or to turn me over to TPTB when they demand it. I stopped posting screen caps here when I found out LJ sends feeds out containing my posts. I found my pictures in placed I didn't want, and my posts on aggregators. I don't want that so I had to friendslock everything since there's no way to stop them. I don't even trust that friendslocking works completely.

Modern fans are bizarrely innocent about this stuff and think the lawyers are happy to see them do music vids and fic and icons...

I hope fandom wakes up soon before anything bad goes on.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	blktauna 2007-01-27 02:51 pm UTC (link)
	I think the goose and the golden egg is a wonderful analogy here. That and the whole reap as you sow thing. I didn't renew after the takeover and I come here less and less, usually only to stick my .02 on the news and design etc posts. But honestly, who really didn't see this? (Reply to this) (Thread)

	ex_shattered767 2007-01-28 03:22 am UTC (link)
	Apparently they didn't. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	blktauna 2007-01-28 03:08 pm UTC (link)
	Well for marketing people, they sure haven't grasped their market... (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	ex_shattered767 2007-01-28 03:20 pm UTC (link)
	No kidding. Brad's worried that this ads on the homepage thing is gonna make Paid users stop renewing. Hate to break it to him, but people have been deciding to let their time run out for months now, and ads on the homepage is lower on the list of reasons than he thinks. (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

blktauna
2007-01-28 03:33 pm UTC (link)

Oh you mean the like the crap service, the bizarre additions/changes and outages?

I'm getting annoyed with the whole database errors on comment posting thing and I'm never here. I can only imagine what regular users feel like.

And if there's a huge tax on the database, I can't imagine they don't know where its coming from. Cut that servie back or off untill you have the wherewithall to bring it back. The lack of common sense is stunning.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	ex_shattered767 2007-01-29 01:19 am UTC (link)
	Exactly. And they weren't even the straw that broke my back! That comment thing is just stupid. There's no other word for it, especially when a note of it supposedly being fixed is made in lj_releases. Oh wait, slightly different error message. Whatever, it's been happening for what, going on 2 months now? Common sense and LJ - they mix like oil and water. (Reply to this) (Parent)

livredor
2007-01-28 08:39 pm UTC (link)

Maybe Brad is worried about that. Myself, I suspect that paid users not renewing is really the least of LJ's problems. Having gone over to the sponsored model they don't really need the income from paid users. I think they're not even too worried about people leaving LJ, because for the huge majority, the community keeps them here no matter how degraded the service is. I suspect there's a critical threshold; either more or less everybody will stay around, or a huge proportion will leave, suddenly, all at once, and the site will die within a few months or even weeks. That scenario worries me, but I don't think it worries LJ much, and, well, it hasn't happened yet so it might not happen.

I suspect that the real problem from a marketing point of view is getting new users to sign up. I would be devastated if every thoughtful, interesting person who left LJ was replaced by six moronic teenagers who want to be in on the latest cool thing (and will get bored in a few months anyway), but for LJ, that would be a great outcome, because that is the demographic that the advertisers are interested in. My feeling is that ads on the front page is a bad decision because it will put people off signing up in the first place.

People being pissed off about detailed technical things like whether the sponsored communities are separated from real search results, or not liking changes to the update page, basically LJ can afford to ignore us. The poor reliability sort of straddles both cases; it may annoy current users enough to drive them away, and it may put people off from staying around long enough to become part of the community, even if it doesn't put people off signing up in the first place.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

foxfirefey
2007-01-28 11:21 pm UTC (link)

Myself, I suspect that paid users not renewing is really the least of LJ's problems. Having gone over to the sponsored model they don't really need the income from paid users.

I dunno, paid users still make up a sizable chunk of income. But I don't think a slow bleed of paid users, if that's what is happening, wouldn't discourage ads-on-the-front-page as much as encourage it. You put up as many ads as you can, and if people don't want to see them, well, they can buy a paid account if they actually cared, right?

I'll be able to see a little whether or not paid users are increasing or decreasing in a couple of days or so, as soon as my most recent profile download run is done.

I suspect that the real problem from a marketing point of view is getting new users to sign up.

No, I think it's retaining the new users who do sign up--from a marketing point of view, they concentrate on getting new users to sign up to Vox. I don't know how many of the apprx 6-7 thousand new accounts every day actually come from new users, though LJ has a better idea because of the ljuniq cookie.

basically LJ can afford to ignore us

Agreed, network effect is too strong for people heavily involved. I think LJ just won't grow as fast--like others in this thread, I don't really push people to join LJ anymore, since it takes too long to explain how to turn off the ads along with justifying why they should use LJ as opposed to their other many options.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	ex_shattered767 2007-01-29 01:21 am UTC (link)
	At this point, if I could throw the 11 months of my paid time in the trash bin, I would. I don't even care to keep it. (Reply to this) (Parent)

ex_shattered767
2007-01-29 01:27 am UTC (link)

"I think they're not even too worried about people leaving LJ, because for the huge majority, the community keeps them here no matter how degraded the service is."

Of course they're not really worried. If they were, they'd start following through on half of the promises they make. Unfortunately, the service is pretty close to being crap as it is, IMO. (Come on, more outtages and site errors in the last 6 weeks than in the 2 years prior? LJ was completely failing to load for me the other morning, no matter what page I tried - what's this Paid account for?)

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	melinika 2007-01-27 04:22 pm UTC (link)
	Maybe that's where the original reference to "no ads on the front page" came from - from Brad? Since it seemed obvious such a thing was outside the scope of "opt-in" and, well, looks bad whether you use the service or not. (Reply to this) (Thread)

foxfirefey
2007-01-27 10:07 pm UTC (link)

I dunno. I seem to remember a comment from a staff member (but not remembering who it would've been) on either the original

lj_biz or

news in response to someone asking whether or not there would be ads on the front page where they, as a paid user, logged in. Other people seem to have these memories too.

BUT, I have been over both those posts very diligently lately, and have not been able to find it. That means that:

1. My memory is false. It comes from a support member, perhaps, bless their hearts, we found one of those, or I just thought someone said that. And then the other people got that idea from me and believed it was true, too.

2. It existed, but wasn't true, and has since been screened. Since I know comments do get screened sometimes on official comms, this isn't as totally conspiracy theory as I might otherwise think.

It wouldn't really bug me all that much except I really don't like to have been saying something untrue for so long without even realizing it and stopping.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	smashingstars 2007-01-27 10:32 pm UTC (link)
	I think it's #2. Too many of us had very similar memories as to where we saw the information. Seeing Brad's post today makes me almost certain that, at some point, it was said that no ads would be on the front page. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	beckyzoole 2007-01-27 09:45 pm UTC (link)
	6A is starting to get things right. I just hope it's not too late. They really are degrading the LJ brand by splashing ads on the front page. Sad. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	foxfirefey 2007-01-27 09:47 pm UTC (link)
	It's a good way to make some money, certainly. But it's not such a good way to treat your paid users. (Or your Basic users, really, but those accounts are used to this kind of treatment by now, and it's not like they make money otherwise, right?) (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

	uniquewonders 2007-01-27 09:55 pm UTC (link)
	"(Or your Basic users, really, but those accounts are used to this kind of treatment by now, and it's not like they make money otherwise, right?)" Not sure what you meant exactly but I'm pretty sure some basic users buy gifts and stuff even if they don't have a paid account. And how many basic users have been paid users at some point? (Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

foxfirefey
2007-01-27 10:08 pm UTC (link)

Well, some of the Basic users. But what's worth more--some of the Basic users buying gifts with a really low profit margin (I imagine credit card fees take up most of that $1) or all Basic users seeing ads when they stumble on the right pages, like

news? I'm sure they know how much money Basic users make when buying stuff, how many Basic users were once paid, and how much money Basic users make when looking for ads. (Their ad server keeps track of the account level, if I'm not mistaken.)

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	queerbychoice 2007-01-27 10:08 pm UTC (link)
	I don't see any sign that they're starting to get things right in the least. (Reply to this) (Parent)

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