Annoyed – perhaps disproportionately so – by the news that LiveJournal now no longer offers a free account which isn’t supported by advertising. The problem that the platform’s users have with this development is not so much the introduction of advertising – every other site has it, after all – but rather with the way in which the news was delivered. Or rather, not delivered: the development was “outed” by a LiveJournal user in the comments to one of the site’s monthly updates.
I’ve been a LiveJournal user since at least 2002, and have a lot of love for the platform even as I feel I have outgrown it. I’ve met many friends through the site, and am confident that this blog wouldn’t be as widely read if it wasn’t for the community I became a part of back when I was posting there a little more regularly (the fact that the syndicated feed of this blog is one of the 1,000 top feeds on the site is a pretty clear indication). So I have watched with disappointment during LiveJournal’s two respective sales, observed the bumbled introduction of advertising and the “sponsored journals” that were little more than unlabelled corporate shills until they rethought the policy and flagged them up a little more clearly, and despaired during the mass deletion and subsequent restoration of predominantly fandom journals that became known as Strikethrough ’07.
When LiveJournal was first sold to SixApart (it has subsequently been sold again), I remember people worrying that the target demographic of the site was changing with us older users being nudged towards sister company Vox. I could link to Vox itself, but the URL is not rocket science and my dear friend Jonic’s one-man campaign against the site is much more entertaining. The sad thing is that with this lastest announcement, the Myspacification of LiveJournal – for want of a more elegant term – seems complete. While us older adopters might scowl and moan about “the old days”, kids today are so accustomed to seeing advertising all over their Bebo profiles that they won’t see the problem in seeing advertising on a site unless you pay. And they’re right of course – the virtual world is one that changes as much as the real one, and it’s evolve (or install Firefox ad blockers) or die. I still have a LiveJournal account, where I occasionally post things either too trivial or too personal for this site, and keep up with friends. I will hold onto that account as long as I need to for at least the latter purpose, and tut as the “new management” refuse to learn from their mistakes.
Advertising on blogs makes me uncomfortable. I understand why people do it, of course – webspace doesn’t pay for itself. I pay about £10 a month to run this site, which doesn’t include an annual domain name charge and an annual subscription to Flickr – one “social networking” site I feel is worth every penny. That’s not me moaning – I could get it for cheaper, and I will as soon as I have a minute to look into the whys and wherefores and whine at my Web Hedgehog (if Neil Gaiman gets a “Web Elf”, I can have a hedgehog) to explain the techy bits. I feel that advertising calls into question the impartiality that is one of the most obvious benefits the medium has over new media. There’s a lack of control inherent in programmes such as Google’s Adsense as well that makes me squirm. It’s my loss, of course – and now I wonder if perhaps I’m sitting on a goldmine.
Meh, it’s the weekend and you don’t care. Have you found Ryan Adams’ utterly bonkers blog yet? That’ll keep you going for a good five minutes while you work up the energy to go concern yourself with real matters.
The link to said bonkers blog is broken, my dear x
I use Vox occasionally.My biggest problem is sometimes the pages get a little hard to load, but it’s free (not ad-free) and somewhat customizable.
WOW.
I’m really glad they told us about this.
And as in told us about this: that I had to find out from you.
And honestly, I’d like to know what percent of lj users actually read the ljnews updates. I don’t; I never have. I rarely, if ever, look at my “home” page on lj, and until your post showed up on my friends page, I was completely unaware that any changes were being made. Let alone a change this big.
Man.
Have fixed the link, rushing out so will respond properly later!
NO WAY!
It’s gone to the dogs, really. I so glad I went ‘out on my own’. LJ’s going to lose all it’s older folk, I’m sure of it.
Thank you so much for the link I think that I love him even more after reading that .
Wow. I was actually unaware of this latest development in LJ’s downward spiral. It doesn’t surprise me, though, which is sad. I’ve actually been contemplating starting up a new blog elsewhere, like Word Press or Blogger. Unfortunately, I have many contacts who I met through LJ over the years (going on 7 now, I believe) and most are solely LJ-users. I want to stay in touch with them so like you, I am forced to stick around Lj land as the ship sinks.
Oh thank you for the link to Ryan’s mad blog!I didn’t know about that and it was a pleasant surprise on a far too average working day!
You need to keep a frequent eye on Ryan’s blog, by the looks of my feed reader he posted about twenty times overnight but had deleted them all by morning!
Oh… I just emailed you that link to Ryan’s tumblr account as if to say “I know something you don’t know”, but I clearly underestimated your fangirl tendencies to know everything about that man the second it happens
I’ll keep it to myself in future, seeing as though it’s likely to entail unnecessary wear and tear on the old keyboard
As for blog advertising, you may remember back in the early days of this current incarnation of 100yen that I had a little adsense advertising going on… I ditched it after a couple of month after it netted me somewhere in the region of 90 cents over that entire period. My hosting’s cheaper than yours though, so it’s not so much trouble paying for it without help…
Lately Six Apart have picked an unwinnable fight with the WordPress lot in the run up to WP 2.5′s imminent release. King of WordPress Matt Mullenweg’s rebuttal made me feel all warm inside because I’m supporting a real open source effort (even if I am abandoning the platform to build my own)…
I’ve just written more in this one comment than I have on my own blog in the past six months… How did I manage that?
Not the second it happens – it did take me a few hours as I believe I was asleep at the time
Please don’t feel you can’t email me stuff, what if I DO miss something? I would be gutted. You don’t want that, do you?
I am going to sort out hosting and stuff as soon as I have a chance, or at least before I have to renew my domain again in June. You don’t by any chance have a copy of that long email you sent me on the subject however long ago? It disappeared with the rest of my inbox before I learned better.
I heard about that SixApart post… fuckers.
Sorry you got marked as spam by the way, I don’t know why my blog doesn’t like you! It’s probably in a sulk because it misses having you around in the posting sense, innit.
I used to use fotothing, but they limit yr uploads on the freebie bit. Thing is, the company that runs it now has adverts everywhere on it. If you paid for unlimited upload, part of the deal was that you got no ads, but this seems to be a thing of the past and a lot of folk are mighty pisd. Fotonomy is the place. Totally free, no limits.
Loved the Ryan Adams blog. That’s going in the links. Cheers!