Adsense for Communities

[tmelange]

Title
Adsense for Communities

Short, concise description of the idea
Adsense should be enabled for paid communities.

Full description of the idea
Adsense should be enabled for paid communities. I can't imagine why it wouldn't be.
An ordered list of benefits

• Same as for a paid personal account.

An ordered list of problems/issues involved

• Same as for a

Comments

[toucanpie]

I agree with your point that on other sites or forums the money ends up in the pocket of the person who sets up/maintains them. But on LJ there's not really such a thing as necessary costs for your community (ie. hosting). Sure the maintainer might be shelling out $$ for the paid account status, perhaps also for a domain/server/whatever to go alongside the comm, but they might not be and they sure as hell don't have to. The paid account could be paid for by other members of the comm, they could have inherited the comm with paid account time on it; they may have no costs to recoup at all.

I think my main problem is that all of a sudden the friendly community I like to post in is making money off me. And it's not like visiting someone's adSense-d journal because I can block ads if I want. You're making the community into a mini LJ - using my content to make you money to use for your unclear purposes that I may well not agree with. Now obviously I'm on LJ right now, posting, so I know I go along with that, but that doesn't mean I want to see more of it. Yes, I could not post in that community, but then I would have to find a new 'home' and would suddenly have a lot of old content that I would have to go track down all over the site and delete not to participate.

Also, as a paid user not opted in to adSense, I might not even realise that the community (and my posts in it) had been monetized. How does that work? Does every member of the community get an email when someone flips that switch or would I just go on un-notified?

I also think there'd be a lot of drama. "The mod of $fandomcommunityx is using money from our fic posts to purchase hookers and blow! They said they'd use it on a mirror site and cupcakes :(".

[tmelange]

When you post a comment to someone's personal journal, your comments are monetized, both by livejournal, and by anyone who has adsense enabled on their own behalf. The distinction you are making between posts made to a comm, and comments posted to someone's journal is illusory. Right now, I have adsense enabled on my journal, and if you were to comment on any post, you would be adding to my page impressions, and if you were to follow a story announcement from a comm to my journal, where the story actually lives, your presence reading my journal would be monetized. The only thing you're preventing by making this an issue where comms are concerned is the owner of the comm (who usually does a heck of a lot of work) benefiting from the ads on the space he/she maintains. And it isn't even that much of a real issue because *someone* is already making money off of the ads, and you have no control over that money at all.

I'd MUCH rather see money being collected anyway end up in the pocket of the people who go out of their way to organize spaces and activities for other people to utilize and enjoy than to see it accrue to some corporate entity. If they want to spend it on hookers and blow, so what? If I were that bothered by the whole notion of ad revenue, I'd buy a paid account.

This is beyond the fact that there are many comms that are moderated, and not open to member posting, and to which ad income could be meaningful, as in the case of fandom newsletters that take a whole HELL of a lot of effort on the part of the editors. I can't imagine begrudging them the income that is being collected ANYWAY.

[foxfirefey]

I'd MUCH rather see money being collected anyway end up in the pocket of the people who go out of their way to organize spaces and activities for other people to utilize and enjoy than to see it accrue to some corporate entity.

On the other hand, LiveJournal is the corporate entity expected to implement this, and it might be against their financial interests to do so, so why would they?

Unlike personal journals, paid communities don't have many extra useful features. So, in that case, it'd only make sense to pay for a community to put ads on it if the ads gave more revenue than the cost of a paid account.

Except if LJ lets people who buy paid communities get that ad revenue instead, it means that there is now an incentive for the most popular communities that make the most ad revenue to go paid and then LJ gets less than it did before. (Also keep in mind that the ad networks LJ uses makes more money than Google AdSense does, or else they'd be using Google AdSense more instead.)

Now, it's possible that the mechanics don't actually work out like that, or that LJ would implement it just out of the "good of their heart" or something, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's another reason for communities to not get to hook up their own AdSense.

(An argument for doing it, I suppose, is that it gives good community maintainers an incentive to keep their communities active and healthy, but it's sort of weak in the face of cold hard cash.)

[mordyn4]

I agree with all of the points you've made on this post.