Changes are coming

[fiddlingfrog]

Over in ruljautonews we have a translation of igrick's latest entry where he details some upcoming changes to advertising on LJ. Specifically, a modified form of the self-promo block that's already available on the Cyrillic homepage will be made available to all journal owners, with all proceeds from that block going to the journal owner. And buried in the

Comments

[matgb]

Yeah, no problem with that at all, if someone wants to pay me to put ads in my journal and I choose whether those ads are acceptable or not, that's entirely up to me, if that'd been the sort of model in the first place I think it would've been a good approach overall, it doesn't break the basic model and it encourages people to be paying for services on site &c.

[fiddlingfrog]

This move certainly makes sense from the Russian "LJ is a mix of pro blogging platform/Tumblr" perspective. My only disappointment is the change of the ToS so that this form of advertising is seen by paid/perm users. While you could argue that journal-owner selected and vetted advertising is part of the journal's content, there are probably enough hardcore anti-advertising people that there will be a bit of a stink about this. Though I have to wonder how many of those paid/perm accounts will actually see advertising. It sounds like this ad will be seen only on the journal and entry views, not in an entry on the friends page, so it's at least better than the advertising model someone like tema uses where he inserts advertising directly into the end of his entries.

[foxfirefey]

Yes. I like this model overall--it's pretty much Project Wonderful's model, which I've always liked and am pretty sure I talked about in this community previously

[fiddlingfrog]

I don't think image are going to be a part of this at all. Looking at the Russian homepage and the screenshot of the new feature the promo blocks look to be text only.

And we all have social capital already, it just isn't displayed for non-Cyrillic users. That will be changing soon.

[foxfirefey]

Huh! Text only, well, that even means no blinky distracting images.

Hmm, it looks like that's only for communities. So maybe promos for communities only to start with for Cyrillic users? That's something else to think about, how turning tokens into money for who works for communities. I guess it's going to be the owner of the community, and that's one of the reasons they did that whole thing earlier.

[andy]

It's not community-only; moreover, I believe personal journals would benefit from this feature the most.

[foxfirefey]

Huh, as far as I can tell this line of code in the change fiddlingfrog linked only enables the display for SUP enabled journals and communities:

+ if ((ref $ua_position eq 'HASH') || (ref $position eq 'HASH' && ( $u->journaltype eq 'C' || LJ::SUP->is_sup_enabled($u)))) {

But of course, it's just a small snippet, there could be later changes, and I'm only all that familiar with the DW codebase. Thanks for the info, though!

I keep waffling on whether personal journals would benefit most. I think that's true on the Cyrillic side, but not sure it applies for the circles I've run in.