Give us Give More

[msqu]

Title
Give us Give More

Short, concise description of the idea
Bring back the Give More holiday promotion.

Full description of the ideaPlease just bring back the Give More holiday promotion. I buy stuff through it every year, including more paid time for myself. Giving coupons to my friends so that they can have ten dollars off something they're not

Comments

[lady_angelina]

Well, in regards to the apparent objection to people buying the accounts for less than a year, I was hearing that the recipients weren't necessarily bothering to renew their Paid accounts after they expired. It also doesn't make a lot of sense (to me, anyway) to purchase a Paid account for, say, two months with LJ footing the cost of a full-year's worth of userpic add-on space. It would be a waste of revenue on LJ's part (not a whole lot, granted, but it does add up), and a waste for the giver if the recipient wasn't able nor willing to take full advantage of the userpic add-on. (Granted, that wouldn't be the case if the recipient did, in fact, manage to pay for the rest of the year.)

I get what you're saying, and it does make sense from a business standpoint. But for whatever reason, the powers that be at LiveJournal decided to impose the restriction of requiring a full-year's worth of Paid time in order to redeem the coupons. Thus, I was just trying to make my own suggestion a compromise of sorts to what they offered this year, in the hopes that there might be a better chance of acceptance. (Same goes for the second bullet point in my original comment; I would personally prefer that the promotion include those with Paid and Permanent accounts, but again, they chose to restrict it to those without, so...)

Sorry if I'm rambling here. X_x My brain is dead, obviously.

[lady_angelina]

Ah, really? For some reason, I thought that it included a full year's worth of userpic add-on (but then, I only purchased the accounts for a full year at a time, so...)

In that case, I definitely misunderstood there. ^^;; *Is a complete idiot, as expressed in her icon* Sorry for the confusion. ^^;;;;;

ETA: Well... I'll be darned... According to last year's promotion, not only did it not specifically say that it's a full year's worth of userpic space (again, it never occurred to me to purchase less than a full year), but... it also said specifically that the purchase has to be for someone other than oneself. So... now I'm not understanding what people are talking about when they say that they use Give More to extend their own accounts. =/ Are they just using alternate accounts to do it that way...?

[lady_angelina]

I thought about that, too... but even verifying email addresses and IP addresses can be easily foiled. One of my now-defunct accounts is registered to a different email address than my primary one... and I access LJ from my PC and from my mobile device, both using dynamic IP addresses. (So in effect, my entire suggestion is null and void because there wouldn't be a reliable way to ensure that the purchaser wasn't the same as the recipient.)

I never used Give More for myself because my primary journal's Paid status was subsidized by another party, and I never needed the extra userpic add-on. Then I got a Permanent account, which includes the maximum level of userpics, so... again, it's never really been an issue for me.

[ceilidh]

But what does it really even matter if the giver and recipient are the same, on LJ's end? They're getting money from me, which they aren't getting if everyone on my flist is paid/perm and I can't give them coupons. (They aren't all paid/perm, but the friends I am close enough to to give a gift are.)

[lady_angelina]

I know, and I'm in the same boat, actually; most of the people on my Friends list already have Paid or Permanent accounts, and the ones who don't either aren't interested or aren't able to foot the remaining balance for a Paid Account.

I guess what I was trying to do was propose a compromise that addressed the reasons that LiveJournal came up with this coupon thing in the first place -- because, as danceinacircle said below, they were apparently perceiving that people were abusing Give More. But in my previous comment, I realized that it still wouldn't be workable. Besides, it was based on a major misunderstanding on my part of how the Give More promotion worked. ^^;;;;

[ceilidh]

Even if people were abusing Give More, I still can't see that the coupon thing would make more money for LJ than Give More. If they wanted to replace GM for reasons of abuse, the coupon thing is still not the kind of promotion to do at the holidays. Some other random time of year, maybe? Not to encourage people to "gift" users with coupons that they have to spend money to use. If I give you something and you have to spend money to use it, it's a tacky gift (like me saying "here, have some coupons for McDonalds for a free drink with a $10 purchase!!"--that's a gift???), and because of the way it's structured there's no incentive for me to give gifts to my Paid friends. GM was an incentive for me to buy time for my friends. Nothing's stopping me from buying them now, but it was a lot easier for me to plop down $50 or so on paid accounts for people when the userpics were thrown in for free. I felt like I was getting more value for my money.

I still think the abuse reasons are just stupid. If the toy store puts Barbies on sale for 50% off, it doesn't matter to them whether I'm buying the Barbie for my kid or my niece, the money's the same. Maybe I'll buy one for each of them at that price instead of just one for one of them.

(I'm not arguing with you, by the way, and I'm sorry if it comes off that way. I'm just sort of airing my thoughts in this thread because they seem to fit.)

[azurelunatic]

I know at least one person who cheerfully renewed all of their paid roleplaying accounts by purchasing gifts between them. I believe people also made pacts with friends.

[lady_angelina]

Yeah... I get that now. ^^;;; I don't know why it never occurred to me to do that (nor that I somehow misunderstood the wording of Give More to mean that it had to be in year-long increments of Paid time).

Nevertheless, it still feels like a loophole, and I kind of get why TPTB might have started the coupon thing to get around it, but it doesn't mean that I like it any better. Among other things, I still don't like that it effectively places work on the recipient to redeem the coupons for a specific purchase; that's not fair to them. (Besides, as some of the people above explained, TPTB are likely just going to end up shooting themselves in the proverbial foot financially because this year's promotion excludes so many potential recipients.)