Advertising in news; new community creation taskflow
The current news post is about the Advisory Board, but the previous post on LJ's 10th birthday had an interesting level of partnerships and marketing in it.
The first item was the partnership with Blurb. On one hand, offering books of LJs has been something users have suggested as a revenue making tool for LJ for a while. Partnering up with a company that does this professionally makes sense, as it's not LJ's field. Unfortunately, Blurb's implementation is very shoehorned and awkward for LJ, and the lack of many complaints or squees in the news post indicates a lack of interest. Limits of the software at the time of release included: only downloading a few hundred of your first entries, no easy distinction or filtering of friended/filtered/private posts, the "category" of entries is the entry's first tag by alphabet making it erratic and near useless, the default page layout is very space inefficent which means it's very easy to hit the 440 max page limit with not much content, and it crashed when I was testing it on the Mac.
The second item was a promo of a contest from Nature Made, accompanied by a sponsored Writer's Block that serves as a contest submission. The news copy calls them "our friends". While the links are under the cut, the company name isn't, so due to the inherent difficulties of separating out sponsored content from other content in news posts, paid users watching news get treated to a dose of advertising. Another interesting note, Plus was probably inadvertantly omitted from this sentence: "If you have a Basic, Paid, or Permanent account and want to share your story with Nature Made, click here to answer the question." I can't imagine Plus accounts are actually not included, however. danceinacircle has let me know that Plus accounts have that link directly in the Writer's Block and didn't need the link like the other accounts do, although as far as I know Basic users see sponsored Writer's Blocks.
However, the main impetus for this post is something I discovered while creating a new community: after you enter in the name of the community and its basic setup (the account level being most likely Plus instead of Paid) and press the button to create it, you are forwarded to the advertising tab of account settings. That is, LiveJournal considers the most important step in the taskflow after creating a community to be selecting the appropriate advertising for the community, rather than filling out the profile, selecting a style, or other community set up tasks. I imagine this is because community creators will go do those other tasks on their own, but few if not prompted will go fill out the advertising settings. Communities are ripe for advertising based monetization, as most paid features are irrelevant to them. Additionally, they are viewed by many people, with popular communities generating many more pageviews than most personal journals. (It is a pity for LJ's money flow that ohnotheydidnt is a Permanent account, rendering it useless for harvesting advertising revenue from its server breaking load.) Since all accounts that are not paid show advertising (Basic communities show advertising to logged out users), having more community maintainers fill out this information could dividends later. ETA: This doesn't mean that checking those boxes is a necessary part of creating a community, just that community creators are led to that page. They're free to leave it without entering anything.
The above paragraph is really a roundabout yet relevant way of mentioning that sometimes I want to make LJ meta posts that don't have anything to do with advertising, so I've created meta_lj to fill that ridiculous need for myself and hopefully others, which is how I found out about the new community creation process. I imagine I'm going to be posting more there than here now. I would also like to thank uniquewonders for her years of service to this community, as she has retired her position. I've considered retiring myself, but decided it would be better to just manage the moderator queue here and post if some event strikes my fancy (ala the death of Basic or something else quite noticeable).
On a more positive note, LJ has opted out of the UK ISP-level tracking advertising company Phorm: see ZDNet: Amazon refuses to be tracked by Phorm and Livejournal opt-out of Phorm. Time for some tupshin love.
General news about the difficulties of monetizing user content generated sites and social networks that might be of interest: here is an article on YouTube and here is one on Facebook.
The first item was the partnership with Blurb. On one hand, offering books of LJs has been something users have suggested as a revenue making tool for LJ for a while. Partnering up with a company that does this professionally makes sense, as it's not LJ's field. Unfortunately, Blurb's implementation is very shoehorned and awkward for LJ, and the lack of many complaints or squees in the news post indicates a lack of interest. Limits of the software at the time of release included: only downloading a few hundred of your first entries, no easy distinction or filtering of friended/filtered/private posts, the "category" of entries is the entry's first tag by alphabet making it erratic and near useless, the default page layout is very space inefficent which means it's very easy to hit the 440 max page limit with not much content, and it crashed when I was testing it on the Mac.
The second item was a promo of a contest from Nature Made, accompanied by a sponsored Writer's Block that serves as a contest submission. The news copy calls them "our friends". While the links are under the cut, the company name isn't, so due to the inherent difficulties of separating out sponsored content from other content in news posts, paid users watching news get treated to a dose of advertising. Another interesting note, Plus was probably inadvertantly omitted from this sentence: "If you have a Basic, Paid, or Permanent account and want to share your story with Nature Made, click here to answer the question." I can't imagine Plus accounts are actually not included, however. danceinacircle has let me know that Plus accounts have that link directly in the Writer's Block and didn't need the link like the other accounts do, although as far as I know Basic users see sponsored Writer's Blocks.
However, the main impetus for this post is something I discovered while creating a new community: after you enter in the name of the community and its basic setup (the account level being most likely Plus instead of Paid) and press the button to create it, you are forwarded to the advertising tab of account settings. That is, LiveJournal considers the most important step in the taskflow after creating a community to be selecting the appropriate advertising for the community, rather than filling out the profile, selecting a style, or other community set up tasks. I imagine this is because community creators will go do those other tasks on their own, but few if not prompted will go fill out the advertising settings. Communities are ripe for advertising based monetization, as most paid features are irrelevant to them. Additionally, they are viewed by many people, with popular communities generating many more pageviews than most personal journals. (It is a pity for LJ's money flow that ohnotheydidnt is a Permanent account, rendering it useless for harvesting advertising revenue from its server breaking load.) Since all accounts that are not paid show advertising (Basic communities show advertising to logged out users), having more community maintainers fill out this information could dividends later. ETA: This doesn't mean that checking those boxes is a necessary part of creating a community, just that community creators are led to that page. They're free to leave it without entering anything.
The above paragraph is really a roundabout yet relevant way of mentioning that sometimes I want to make LJ meta posts that don't have anything to do with advertising, so I've created meta_lj to fill that ridiculous need for myself and hopefully others, which is how I found out about the new community creation process. I imagine I'm going to be posting more there than here now. I would also like to thank uniquewonders for her years of service to this community, as she has retired her position. I've considered retiring myself, but decided it would be better to just manage the moderator queue here and post if some event strikes my fancy (ala the death of Basic or something else quite noticeable).
On a more positive note, LJ has opted out of the UK ISP-level tracking advertising company Phorm: see ZDNet: Amazon refuses to be tracked by Phorm and Livejournal opt-out of Phorm. Time for some tupshin love.
General news about the difficulties of monetizing user content generated sites and social networks that might be of interest: here is an article on YouTube and here is one on Facebook.