LJ becoming evil? [Matthew's Journal]

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It seems that Basic accounts no longer exist for new users - you can be full of ads, or pay LJ money. I tested this by creating an account...

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There are 29 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

I guess it was inevitable sooner or later, I'm just loving the marketing speak explaining that the choice of more than two accounts is too confusing for us to understand...

In fairness, at least We are working hard to add even more features and are currently revisiting our ad-supported strategy to find ways to deliver more user value in a way that isn't crass looks like it might be promising at some stage. Although I agree the marketing speak is special.

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I don't WANT features. Every time they come up with a feature I have to stop and work out how to turn it off. I want user-generated content with no ads.

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Honesty of the 'we think we need to run LJ on this business model, with an obvious income stream' would have been more appropriate, true. A pity.

*settles back to watch the tears, recriminations and users threatening to move to IJ*

"becoming"?

(S)

"evil"?

Seriously, they have to pay for the resources somehow. Why should they give away completely unencumbered accounts?

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"Evil" wasn't really my choice of word, but I don't think LJ's nature in this regard has changed.

Since they have to pay for the resources, they should have thought of that and not offered free basic accounts to start with. As it is, it's something of a bait-and-switch scam. (Admittedly with the niggle that existing basic accounts are still working, but I imagine it won't be long before they're magically `upgraded' to have adverts.)

(S)

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Lots of places that are starting up offer free or reduced rate packages that are effectively lossmaking, to establish themselves. I see no problem with this, nor the change now, and suspect the only people moaning are people who already HAVE a basic account so what does it matter? Anyone who currently doesn't, can either choose to accept the ads, or use another journal.

Personally, I have no problem with the new model. (Although marketing speak is indeed always rubbish and I ignore it).

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They'd better bloody not.

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I'm not personally bothered too much by ads, but the answer is that "freeloaders" create the content that paid users read (as well as writing comments on their account, and generally providing the community network that makes LJ so useful).

Although I'd be happy to pay for LJ if necessary, if LJ hypothetically went paid-only, the large numbers of people that would then leave may mean that I'm no longer interested in it...

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I suspect they realise that. Users attract other users.

It looks to me like they're being a bit disingenuous about their business model, but "evil" seems like an awfully strong word for this.

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It always used to be the case that users with a plus account could "downgrade" to a basic account, removing the ads (and "upgrade" too). Is that still true?

I suspect not. I think the only way to get a basic account is to already have one, IYSWIM.

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My understanding is that if you already have a plus account you can switch back and forth to Basic. It's just that new accounts can only be Plus.

The reference has been to the new FAQ, but I'm sure I've seen somebody say they tried it and it worked.

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Well, whilst this is obviously annoying... they do have costs that they have to meet. I'm constantly amazed by people expecting stuff to be free as it is, and the idea that something that is *free* to the user shouldn't even try to raise revenue with adverts is pretty bonkers.

With a small user base you can probably rely on enough people to offer some money for some small extra feature or even just out of generosity - but once the user base is really large I guess you end up finding that there are too many people whose accounts are net costing you money and you can't afford to run the site.

I certainly don't think that "this service costs us money to provide, so you have to pay for it via paying or via looking at adverts" is "evil".

I certainly don't think that "this service costs us money to provide, so you have to pay for it via paying or via looking at adverts" is "evil".

It wouldn't have been - but instead it was that they're "streamlining" the account creation process to make a "simpler and easy to understand work-flow", because having three options to choose from is too confusing for us to understanding.

Okay, still not "evil", but rather odd and perhaps misleading behaviour.

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Ah, er, yes. Their marketing department needs its head examining apparently.

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The free users' job is to attract the paying users; they're _not_ just a drain on the site. Also - the larger the free user base, the larger the proportion of them who decide they'd like to pay. It's a pretty normal loss leader.

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Yes, but maybe it turned out not to be a very good "leader" and they decided that making money off showing the free users adverts wouldn't scare away enough free users to make a difference to that aspect?

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Brad disagrees, and he should know.

[Also, Web adverts generally are a dubious proposition - as Nielsen observes, users are generally completely oblivious to them, to the point that a classic UI mistake is to make a UI element look like a banner ad.

Also, LJ said "no ads, ever", and it is distressing that the new owners do not plan to honour what was left of that promise.

Also, the spin is ridiculous, and new-LJ should at the very least be willing to tell the truth.]

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Well, Brad is probably in a better place to actually know what the financial situation is, so I'll take that as much more likely to be true than my previous speculation.

If users were oblivious to the ads would they complain so much about them?

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"oblivious" in the "do not read" sense not "do not see" sense, clearly.

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doesn't anyone except IE users have scripts to filter these things off their browser view these days?

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Thee and me do, but we're a minority of not-MSIE, and MSIE users may well still be a majority (I'm loathe to conclude anything based on User-Agent).

If the majority were using ABP or similar we'd see more of an arms race between the junk peddlers and the anti-ad tools than there is.

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I am (generally) oblivious to ads in the sense that if you close the window I

a) probably won't know what the ads were for
and
b) may even not have noticed the presence of still-image adverts

But I don't like animated ads, because flashing boxes in the corner of my vision are distracting and make it harder to focus on the things I actually want to see/read.

I note that LJ have now come as close as marketing-speak ever does to saying "maybe we did this wrong".

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Yes, although I'm less than convinced by "we're sorry we span, here's a fresh dose of spin which means 'suck it up'."

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Well, yes.

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Oh balls and I was about to create an account for publicising ts events...

October