LJ becoming evil? : comments [Matthew's Journal]

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".

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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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October