(Untitled)

[bethbethbeth]

(a comment I just left as part of a conversation in my last post):

Interesting. I just conducted a not-very-scientific survey of people who define themselves (or at least their journals) as being part of fandom (i.e., I COUNTED THE ACCOUNT STATUS OF EVERY SINGLE USER ON THREE RANDOM PAGES OF fandom_counts *G*). The results were as follows:

Permanent

Comments

[atdelphi]

Very interesting. I have no idea how that measures up to LJ as a whole (though I would suspect fandom might be slightly higher, given that its demographics tend to skew a little older than LJ at large.) And while I only have a basic account at the moment, like a lot of other people I've received paid time as a gift on several occasions, which seems to largely be a fandom practice.

[aunty_marion]

Indeed. I started out as a free account, then in the last lot of permanent account sales a friend who was bought one donated her extra paid time to me, and I renewed it last year and again this year. Don't know still whether I'll bother to do so next year.

[etrangere]

wow, interesting. I wish we had something else than the pre-Plus account numbers to compare, but even as such, it's extremely significative. We're probably one of their most faithful and lucrative audience.

(300 does sound like a very fine sample, even without quotas ^^)

[summerborn]

LJ's stats page no longer shows how many are paid or permanent, but a little digging gets us some history, as found in a metafilter thread from 2006.

3.8% of accounts were paid accounts in 2002. In July 2004, the percentage was down to 2.3%, and only 1.6% were paid accounts in March '05.

It looks like they used the Wayback Machine to get screenshots, but it seems to be down at the moment (hopefully not gone forever, omg).

[darthfox]

Okay. I'm going to use 1.5% as a ballpark figure, because even assuming the downward trend of paid accounts continues, 6A is still making money from Plus accounts, and I'm going to include both paid and plus when I get to the fannish ones, so. 1.5% of 13,000,000 is 195,000. Expanding Beth's calculations to cover the whole rounded membership of fandom_counts, 50% of 30,000 is 15,000. 15K is about 7.6% of 195K. Less trivial, but still not really a powerful lobbying group.

This has been the product of about 45 seconds' pencil-and-paper-ing, and IANAS (I am not a statistician). Heh.

[cmshaw]

Huh. I have an entirely different reaction to those numbers -- 7.6% of a company's consumers standing up in one day to request the exact same thing? That strikes me as huge.

[aukestrel]

In some of the incredible amount that has been written about this, what if you take 1.5% of the (apparently) active number of LJs, which I have seen quoted at 1.7 million?

[violet_quill]

In the interests of completeness and uh, doing my part I guess, I actually joined fandom_counts with every single one of my RPG journals. Since I never bother to delete them, and I've been in a fair number of games in the last five years, this required me getting a list of all my usernames emailed to me. It was a pretty long list!

But in any case, all of my RPG journals that were created after plus accounts are plus accounts, and the ones that were created before are still basic accounts (with maybe two or three exceptions). So that gives me... two paid accounts, about a half dozen plus accounts, and probably a dozen and some change basic accounts.

... and I don't know why I just commented with this info, I guess I was just being another random sample. :-D

[imkalena]

I was thinking about getting a permanent acct at the next sale, but have decided against that . . . still, they probably get more money from me by not being a permanent acct.