Early Adopter to Paid User to.... hey!

[gogogeri]

Title
Early Adopter to Paid User to.... hey!

Short, concise description of the idea
LJ discounts for long membership holding users.

Full description of the idea
I've been a user of LJ for 5 years now and have brought with me my family and my friends (actually giving codes away -- remember that?). Why not have a benefit for long standing members?
An

Comments

[fweebles]

I don't see any good reason for this other than "I'm an Early Adopter and I want free stuff!"

I think features and community keep people at LiveJournal from running off to clone sites, not discounts that only affect less than 16000 of LiveJournal's members.

[ursamajor]

granted, i am a fellow early adopter, long-time paid member, etc, so take this with that grain of salt ;)

but i have to say i wouldn't mind something, like, say, a perm account sale only open to early adopters. nor would i mind if, say, there was a 10% discount off the standard price.

do i think this is likely to happen? absolutely not. do i still think, "gosh, that'd be nice?" of course!

[ursamajor]

er, which is also to say that i agree that i don't think LJ is exactly lacking for users. or income. :)

[cparker]

Without Early Adopters, there would be no LiveJournal.

I think the notion is a positive one, and I think there should be some way of saying "thank you" other than giving these people "special titles".

[miome]

If you want the benefits of a Perm acct without the money, just go ahead and buy a few years of paid time.

[vvalkyri]

Well, yes.

Saying that, I joined in Feb '03 and I've had a paid account since March of '03, and I'm paid up through June of '06 - over 3 years of paid time. I don't really use any icons nor do I do much with the phone posts or pictures - my paid accountness is more of a "pay for public radio" type thing. And yes, I was one of the people who lj-ified one large friends circle.

$150 is 6 years at current prices. Couple that with the uncertainty of 6 apart, the new TOS, and the fact that 6 years is a long time and I'm not so sure.

Now if the price were usually $150, but if you'd already been paying for 2 years it was $125, and if you'd been paying for 3 years $100, etc . . .

I'd be a lot more tempted than I am right now.

(Call me up in 2015 after I've shelled out an extra $100 past the perm account price and I'm sure I'll regret not doing so but that's different again.)

I'm not sure how useful this is as a business model - unless a big cash influx is needed now, it's probably in LJ's best interests to not make permanent

[davesawyer]

"Pay for public radio..." as a former DJ of a listener-supported NPR station, I can honestly say we appreciate people like yourself. That's the same reason I pay for an account here on eljay.

The idea of an account being "permanent" just seems far-fetched to me -- as if it's life-long. I find it hard to believe that in 10 years we'll still be reading blogs on browsers with computers at our desks. But I could be wrong.

[vvalkyri]

Interesting article.

[beginning]

From a business point of view, this is actually a terrible idea. Paid Users are the ones that keep the site running. Permanent Users pay one time, and that's that. The cash collected can go immediately to some pretty nifty things, but it's not a consistent flow. Frankly, you don't want too many people having Permanent Accounts.

[cos]

I don't think that makes a lot of sense for LJ, it would just be a way of being nice to a small number of users (early adopters are a tiny percentage of the whole). However, as a long time paid user (and early adopter) myself, I would suggest some long term discounts. I'm not buying a permanent account because $150 seems too high - I might've done it for $100. But how about letting people renew for longer terms at mildly lower annual prices? 2 years for $40, 3 years for $60, 4 years for $75, 5 years for $90, and so on. That could tempt a lot of people who currently renew one year at a time, to renew for several, and then you don't lose the money (or the user) if a year or two later if they're broke or no longer interested.

[vvalkyri]

I'd probably go for that.

[beverley]

This idea I like.