Some things that are becoming clear. . . .

[xiphias]

Livejournal.ru is a completely different beast than Livejournal.com. Socially, demographically, culturally, growth potential -- they have nothing in common.

Right now, most young'ns in the Western world are using MySpace and Facebook and the like -- LiveJournal is not really part of the teener crowd so much. Who are we? We're Usenet exiles, science fiction writers, fanficcers, roleplayers. We skew older, and geekier than the general population. An active livejournal.com user is more likely to be a geek, be a pagan, be some other form of "weird".

"Normal people" who blog will be using Blogger or some other specific blogging software. "Normal people" who do social networks will be using MySpace, Facebook, or one of the other dedicated services. We folks on LiveJournal are doing a little of both on the same service.

But livejournal.ru is different. It's mainstream, it's bigger than MySpace and Facebook combined in Russia -- and it's growing. LiveJournal.com is shrinking. To me, that's one of the biggest take-away messages from chipotle post here. Look at that chart. Active users are fewer, while cob-webpages are skyrocketing -- and LJ pays for those.

And, as he points out, the growth is in livejournal.ru.

Is it technically and economically feasible to separate them? SUP paid $30M for LiveJournal -- because it's worth that in Russia. It's not worth anything like that in the West.

Comments

[ron_newman]

If a large number of inactive users are a problem that drags down the service, shouldn't they institute a policy of "use your account or lose it"?

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

Yes!

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

The problem is that there are a number of people on my friendslist who will never update again, like dadlion, who died of a heart attack a couple years back. And yet, I'd be upset to lose their LJs.

Also, some of the dead journals may be from roleplaying games that have wrapped up, but that people would still want to read sometimes.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

So how about providing a simple archiving system for such journals, as a way of end-of-life-ing them rather than letting them remain a drag? It would seem like good business. (Why this won't happen: users can use it to move away from LJ easily, and so won't be quite as trapped here.)

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I see some challenges with that -- if a person is dead, they can't archive it themselves. If you allow someone ELSE to archive and close down a journal, then, well, you could do that to shut someone else down.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Anyone can archive a journal, using their current account to limit what they can/can't see. It's separate from closing a journal -- but if there is a POC for an account that should be expired, including surviving relatives/etc., you contact those folks and offer them a free archiving as a part of close-out from whatever account they have access to.

Basically, it'd just be like LJ offering lj-archive as a service, and proactively offering it in the case of journals they have reason to close (say, idle more than 3 years) but still have old content.

[brooksmoses]

I'm not at all convinced that LJ would see a mass exodus of us Westerners who complain about their policies to be a bad thing, though.

I'm also not at all convinced that dead journals are actually a drag. In today's world, disk is cheap. Processing power and bandwidth are what's expensive, and dead journals don't occupy either unless used.

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to figure out how an inactive account places a burden on the service other than diskspace and bandwidth, both of which should be less than the median usage by an active user.

[nex0s.livejournal.com]

That was a fascinating article - the best one I've seen on the whole kerfluffle.

Thanks.

N.

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

Nice article pointing out the cultural differences between LJ.ru & LJ.com. One place where chipotle and others have erred IMO in their analysis of the strike is as follows

SUP doesn’t get paid for your posts, nor for your reads. They get paid either by you directly or by you responding to ads. In other words, if you’re a basic account holder or a paid/permanent account holder, your use of the system is completely orthogonal to SUP’s revenue.

The part in bold is spot on; SUP derives its ad revenues on clickthrus. I go read my friend xiphias's post on bartending through my ad-enabled account, I see an ad for bartending supplies, click on that and SUP gets paid for the clickthru and gets to determine its future rates based on clicks per day or some other relevant usage metric.

Which makes the part in bold italics incorrect. My non-use of the system as a content-provider can create an impact on SUP's ad revenue stream; my other friend rm boycotts putting up new content so I don't visit LJ through my ad-enabled account; I don't see any advertising and so I cannot click on through. SUP is denied my revenue and it reduces their revenue metrics.

[griffen.livejournal.com]

This is an excellent summary of the mistake, and I appreciate you teasing it out in this manner. Thank you.

[greenlily.livejournal.com]

That was amazingly helpful. Thanks for the pointer.

ETA: I'm amused that an issue which has caused a lot of folks to refuse to create LJ content, has inspired me to read way more actual content (as opposed to, you know, quizzes and porn) than I normally do. :)

[florafloraflora.livejournal.com]

The more I think about this, the more I regret buying a lifetime account when they were offered last year.

[felis-sidus.livejournal.com]

I felt that way at first. Then I realized that given the time estimates for creation of a viable alternative to LJ, by the time I may be ready to go elsewhere I'll have paid less for ad-free use than if I'd paid by the year. That doesn't represent a great deal, but at least it's break-even.

This assumes that SUP honors the contract with permanent account holders. The way they're going, that is a given.

[griffen.livejournal.com]

Thank you for pointing all of this out.

This also means, of course, that SUP is probably baffled by the demographic of LJ.com because they thought it would be the same as LJ.ru, and the fact that it's not is causing some scrambling. Who knows, the younger "normal" demographic that you talk about might have accepted jason-what's-his-name's patronizing and condescension without ever realizing that it was those things, and gone on with their lives.

Food for thought, certainly.

[madcaptenor.livejournal.com]

But it's not like it would have been incredibly difficult for them to find out that the LJ.com and LJ.ru demographics aren't the same thing. Maybe not something you could find out instantly, but when you're spending tens of millions of dollars on something you think you'd look into that sort of thing.

[rmjwell.livejournal.com]

One of my favorite quotes from The Rockford Files: "A con works not because of the subtlety of the scheme nor the cunning of the conman; a con works when the mark believes he can get something for nothing."

I think SUP may have talked themselves into thing that LJ.com was LJ.ru the US Edition. Once that happens all the due dilligence in the world becomes driven by circular logic.

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

If the problem is that we are a splinter of the main business, and not the profitable splinter, then splitting seems like a good idea. If we are even conveniently divided into .com and .ru then splitting us back into our own reality might make a lot of sense. But creating content for LJ doesn't pay for servers, and I would wonder who would foot the bill for our splinter. I suspect there's a distinct possiblity that such a split would result in the plug getting suddenly pulled when the bills got far enough behind. As opposed to the .com side getting killed by slow departures.

[leiacat.livejournal.com]

Livejournal.ru isn't the same sort of creature as livejournal.com. It's an add-on to the .com, a front-end, a toolkit. I have a .ru account because it offers free picture storage space (that I've not used yet). I personally don't use the portal-ability because I only want to read people I already know. But .ru definitely does a really good job of inviting new users and giving them a place to be and things to do even if they don't know any other LJers to start.

Since .ru is designed to integrate with .com (to the extent that you allow - you get extra features by giving .ru the .com password, but you don't have to), .com cannot possibly decline by use of .ru. That's where all the content is.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

because it offers free picture storage space

Bwuh? No wonder they're running out of disc space, if they go giving that away for free!

[leiacat.livejournal.com]

They are running out of disc space?

But I presume it's free. It's advertised as existing, and since I've not yet used it, I've not been told what hoops need jumping for it.