LiveJournal is shrinking. In new faux-academic style!

[pyrop]

(If you're on my friends list, you've seen most of this already.)

LiveJournal is shrinking, at least in terms of active accounts. The number of active accounts reached its peak in April of 2005, and has been decreasing ever since then. Let's take a look at the graphs.

Comments

[ellie]

Of course I can only speak from personal experience, but I think there are a few reasons for the decline

[pyrop]

I'd really like real numbers on the growth of the other social networking/blogging/whatever sites before I say that people are abandoning LJ for them. People also don't have to only use one site. I use LJ and Facebook, both fairly regularly. They're different services and I use them for different things. Myspace, in my opinion, is a poor substitute for LJ.

It's too soon to tell what, if any, effect the whole Strikethrough debacle will have on LJ's usership. You're never going to get a clear picture of the effect, either. When a SNAFU happens, it generally takes people a while to decide to leave because of it, so the loss due to that incident is spread out. It's worth noting, anyways, that even if the entire 35000-person membership of fandom_counts leaves at once, that's only 2% of the number of active accounts, and 4% of the number of accounts that have updated in the past 30 days. Against the normal trend of loss we seem to be having, it would be extremely hard to see.

[kanaetkassad]

myspace/facebook are glorified email accounts to me. myspace is for spam bulletins and email.

i for one hated 6A's position on breastfeeding icons. it's ridiculous. big black mark for me.

[reddragdiva]

Its effects on me won't show until January 2008, when I don't renew my paid account.

[ronaldraygun]

Migration to new services such as Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and Vox probably accounts for a fair amount of loss of usership. There have always been competitors to Livejournal such as Xanga and Deadjournal as well as more "professional" blogging services such as Blogger, Wordpress and Typepad. That being said, though, it'd be hard to attribute recent decline in activity to migration to other blogging services. I think it's just the fact that internet kids want to be at the cutting edge of online social interaction and are finding new services that are not necessarily better but different.

If you look at the 6A purchase date and activity, it looks like they got a raw deal.

It'd be interesting to put launch dates of Twitter, MySpace and Facebook on the same graph and see if that could have an impact. Of course, you'd probably need usage statistics from MySpace et al to see if there's actually a relationship.

[remix79]

Wow! Thanks for all the hard work that went into this post. You should definitely bring this post to 6A's attention (if you haven't already).

[pyrop]

burr86, maintainer of mathematics, is a 6A employee. If he sees it there, that's good. I really hope that 6A is aware of this already, though.

Ikwn

[torgo_x]

Your icon
is in COPTIC! Not a language one sees every day!

What does it say?

Re: Ikwn

[pyrop]

"At sunset black ships ate the sky."

It's the title of apocalyptic folk band Current 93's latest album.

[ex_miang438]

Very interesting analysis, although (not that you can help it) a bit premature to see the effects of Strikethrough and its aftershocks, I think. As far as general usage trends go, I think you're absolutely right that the real story is going to be in the interactions (gender by year, age cohort by year, etc.), and I wish you luck in getting that data.

As for Strikethrough, it's going to take some time for the full impact to be known. Besides the people who've already jumped ship, there are the people who need three to five strikes to decide to go, the people who need all their friends to go before they're willing to move, and the people (possibly the largest category, actually) who haven't gone but are simply refusing to continue paying for the service -- some of whom will eventually go when they decide they hate the free service after being used to paid perks for so long. I'm in the latter group, myself. And all these people will continue to be active until they can get a communication strategy worked out between themselves and

[pyrop]

Getting the data's easy. I've got all the archive.org snapshots sitting on my hard drive. The hard part is going to be greasing up my rusty-ass perl skills to get it out of those html files. :P

And yeah, maybe i'll do an addendum around the end of the year. (Kick me in the butt around December, somebody.)

[joxn]

I approve this icon.

[pyrop]

And I approve this icon!

[joxn]

Can you do that first graph with a log y-axis?

Re: Ikwn

[pyrop]

Sure; here it is.

Re: Ikwn

[joxn]

Maybe it's just me but I like that one best of all. It compresses the meaningless top 90% and lets us see the detail on the bottom.

Re: Ikwn

[joxn]

IM IN UR LIVEJRNL POSTIN ANONYMOUSELY