Why dreamwidth (or, indeed, why not)? : comments [Matthew's Journal]

denise has been a speed-reader since she was about two. ;)

If you're curious about business matters, by the way, check out

dw_biz.

mark and I have the advantage of years of having worked in Web 2.0, and specifically on LJ, so we went into this knowing exactly what it would cost and what we would need to be sustainable, and did our models thusly. If we can hit and maintain a 5% paid account rate, we're in the black; anything over & above is going to let us do really awesome things.

LJ didn't add ads because they were hurting for money; Six Apart was trying to get rich, and now SUP is trying to recoup the vastly inflated purchase price they paid for the property. A while back, I wrote a series of essays about why advertising is bad for social media that I should clean up and post to

dw_biz.

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A useful skill :-)

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply you were a pair of numpties with no idea of what you were letting yourselves in for! Thank you for the comment, though.

Do you have any definite plans wrt future permanent account sales, OOI?

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We are almost certainly not going to do perm sales again. We hate that we even have to on launch, but we want to make sure we have the first years' operating expenses in the bank up front for safety's sake.

Perm sales are bad for the users, because they wind up feeling "hey, they already have my money, why should they care about what I say?" and bad for the business, because it privileges short-term revenue over long-term sustainability. So we really don't want to do it again if we don't have to. We may do one more sale when we move to colocation, if we're making enough to support the business but not enough to do the capital outlay of the colo, but I'd really like to avoid it if at all possible.

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Shucks. I really like permanent accounts (though completely take the point that they're not great for the business).

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Yeah, they are convenient for the user in some ways, and I'm pretty sure we could sell a lot more than 400 of them, but we don't want to risk it. We're really designing for the long term here, and we'd rather make sure that things are sustainable.

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Matthew's Journal

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February