A Business-Related Suggestion for LiveJournal

[raventhon]

LiveJournal is currently letting a massive source of revenue go untapped -- the sale of permanent accounts. I've heard that bradfitz doesn't like selling permanent accounts, for some reason, and while it may seem to (eventually) start sapping money from the paid userbase, it seems that not exploiting this resource isn't the wisest of ideas

Comments

[erebrandir]

What about the people who worked hard and gave countless hours of their time to LiveJournal, and were rewarded with the distinction of having a Permanent Account? Will they be satisfied to have that distinction go away?

[skittl1321]

How will the distinction go away.

Right now there are already a lot of people who bought their permanent accounts, rather than worked for them. Why would this be different.

-My opinion though is from a business standpoint, unless the price is extremely high, permanent accounts don't make sense.-

[vanbeast]

What about all the people who have worked hard and given countless hours of their time to LiveJournal since and still pay for their accounts?

There are plenty of people with permanent accounts who bought them... in fact, I'd be willing to bet that more people purchased permanent accounts than were given them.

There's nothing special about a permanent account except that you don't have to pay for it anymore.

[erebrandir]

If there wasn't something special about them, then why is everybody so interested in having one? Why are people willing to fork over $300 or more for one, when they no doubt would be throwing money away, over the cost of continuing to pay for a Paid Account? Obviously, there is some value to them beyond the monetary.

[vanbeast]

Like I said, there's nothing special about them except that you don't have to pay anymore. Any additional value that one places on it (for instance, "I earned this by volunteering") is simply personal.

My point was the same as Mark's below. They're not a badge of honor, it's just a paid account that you don't have to pay for anymore.

[xb95]

Permanent accounts shouldn't be "badges of honor". They should be accounts...that happen to be permanent.

Other people having a permanent account in no way cheapens your permanent account. You can just realize that you put in the effort and basically got $100 for whatever it cost you to volunteer or whatever.

I don't think that Permanent Accounts should be sold lightly, but perhaps on special occassions LJ should sell 50 or 100 "first come first serve". LJ's birthday, holidays... something like that.

[erebrandir]

To clarify (and I know this shoots my whole argument in the foot), I'm not one of those people who worked for a Permanent Account. I bought mine. But one of the arguments that has consistently been brought up when this issue has arisen, and I happen to agree with it, is that to a lot of people, they were gifts, and it does in fact lessen the value of that gift if just anyone can buy one on the street. I may be misquoting, but I seem to recall Brad himself saying that they were meant to be "badges of honor".

[hdofu]

You know, people buy gifts on the streets right ;)

[theducks]

Without commenting one way or the other on if there should be another permanent account sale, people who earn permanent accounts through their good work for LJ are generally listed as "Permanent Account". Those who have supported LJ in a financial way by purchasing accounts when they were available are generally listed as "Permanent Account, previously ..." and what they were before they paid for the accounts.

User bio pages for denisep and bradfitz show the difference.

(In the interests of full disclosure, I have a perm account. I purchased it because I wanted to support LJ so that my friends who didn't have US$100 at the time could keep using it for free, make a contribution to a great open source project, and because I was in Australia and the payment options at the time were really difficult, so I would have rather only done it once..)

[erebrandir]

That's only true for former Early Adopters. I was a Paid Member before I bought mine, and it simply says 'Permanent Account'.