SixApart breaks pledge, adopts ads.

[insomnia]

So, have you seen the news yet? Sure, it's spun nicely enough, but I ask a bit of your time to consider the following:

Anyone remember this promise LiveJournal made to you back in Apr. 2004?!
We stand firm in saying that we will:

Stay advertisement free
It may be because it's one of our biggest pet peeves, or it may be because they don't

Comments

[insomnia]

The demographics for non-paying users certainly isn't that great... unless, of course, you're marketing to them. Think game designers, military ads, cosmetics, soda/snacks, etc. Teens do have a lot of money to spend, even if they choose not to spend it on LJ. Part of the reason there is so much advertising aimed at them is to establish brand loyalty before they reach their peak buying power.

The pageview information used to be part of the stats, but they yanked that from the public data. The raw data for public stats is here, and it indicates that the data was last available for the public on Mar. 11, 2003.

As for numbers coming out of 6A's financial stability, the best info I've heard is from a venture capitalist who mentioned something about it on their blog. They said that the total revenue doubled in the last year. That's good, but the number of new employees probably quadrupled in that time period.

Doubling revenue doesn't necessarily mean much, considering that 6A's TypePad was such a new service when they bought LJ. Doubling revenue could simply mean that they had LJ's revenue to add to their total, frankly. It doesn't in itself say anything about their ability to achieve profitability, especially with so many employees.