SixApart breaks pledge, adopts ads.

[insomnia]

So, have you seen the news yet? Sure, it's spun nicely enough, but I ask a bit of your time to consider the following:

Anyone remember this promise LiveJournal made to you back in Apr. 2004?!
We stand firm in saying that we will:

Stay advertisement free
It may be because it's one of our biggest pet peeves, or it may be because they don't

Comments

[skrawl]

Here by way of no_lj_ads.
This is very informative. I was skeptical that the ads would actually increase their revenue, and your analysis confirms that fear. Another problem I see with ads is that they're going to be seen mostly by people who don't or can't pay for livejournal... those people seem like they'd be the least likely to be internet shoppers. (Also consider that the largest group of users is 16-20 years old - not a demographic that has tons of spare cash or necessarily even credit cards.)
I just checked the stats page and "updating in last 30 days" is now down to 1289993... Do you know if there's any way to find out the number of Pageviews? And are there *any* numbers coming out about SixApart and LJ's financial stability?

[insomnia]

The demographics for non-paying users certainly isn't that great... unless, of course, you're marketing to them. Think game designers, military ads, cosmetics, soda/snacks, etc. Teens do have a lot of money to spend, even if they choose not to spend it on LJ. Part of the reason there is so much advertising aimed at them is to establish brand loyalty before they reach their peak buying power.

The pageview information used to be part of the stats, but they yanked that from the public data. The raw data for public stats is here, and it indicates that the data was last available for the public on Mar. 11, 2003