Just in case

[koganbot]

FYI in case lj shuts down:

my email is edcasual at earthlink dot net

Perhaps we should have a thread on poptimists about contingency plans if lj actually does go down.

For those not following the story, livejournal laid off a whole hunk of its San Francisco staff, 13 of 30 people says one news site, 20 of 28 says another. Its own not-very-informative statement (at least according to this site) goes:

LiveJournal Inc. today announced a restructuring of their US and Russian operations to more effectively manage costs in light of the global economic downturn. LiveJournal Inc.'s headquarters, technical operations (and servers), legal, administration and the customer service teams will remain in the United States. LiveJournal's global product development and design will now be coordinated out of its Moscow office. The pooling of resources between the US and Russia will allow the company to build a stronger business model, well positioned to guarantee the long-term success of LiveJournal.

As a result of these changes Matthew Berardo, VP and General Manager of LiveJournal Inc., will be leaving the company along with other valued colleagues. Mr Berardo has played the leading role in consolidating product and design effort to enable the business to more effectively streamline costs during his tenure. LiveJournal Inc. will now be led jointly by Stephanie Gravelle, currently LiveJournal Inc.'s director of finance and administration and Sergei Komarov, currently CTO of SUP (the owners of LiveJournal).

I'm curious if anyone knows what LiveJournal's business model was at the start, and what it is now - as in, how they make their money.

Someone spammed a comment thread with good words about this journal sharing site [EDIT: Insane Journal]. But again, can such a site really get a consistent source of income?

By the way, all along I've been downloading most of the journal entries/comment threads where I've made a comment.

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Also, if anyone wants to try this non-LJ Book alternative on Poptimists (it's PC only), that'd be awesome. If I can do it from my password I'll try later today and let y'all know.

http://fawx.com/software/ljarchive/

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

i'm on this. hopefully it will work.

[koganbot]

My web browser has been having trouble loading things all day so I haven't reached it yet. What is this site and what does it do?

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

you download ljarchive and then run it and have an argument with it for about ten minutes before it consents to download the contents of your journal into an archive; i'm about to find out how well it will do with poptimists. :/

ljbook won't do communities, unfortunately. or well, anything at the minute.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

piss, ljarchive won't do comments with communities, unless i'm just being completely idiotic. this seems completely stupid.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

What's the format like?

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

crappy, overall & it opens in your web browser but better than nothing i guess?

it won't do poptimists, argh!

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

I've got an archiving program on my Mac, and I think it will let maintainers archive communities too -- I'll look it up and post the link when I get home tonight.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

If anyone needs to be made a poptimists maintainer in order to archive, just ask me (or Kat or Moggy who I assume can pass on the privilege too!)

[koganbot]

Well, as long as someone is archiving poptimists, we're OK. (If lj does go belly-up, would we be able to import old poptimists content elsewhere, say to Freaky Trigger?)

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

The software I've got archives both XML and HTML, IIRC, which I think means it can be imported into other sites. (Not sure exactly how, though.)

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

Archiving program for Mac (also works on Windows and Linux): LJMigrate. Requires use of command-line prompts, but the tutorial available at that link makes it ridiculously easy.

[koganbot]

Oh yes, and I've sanely been ignoring my MySpace for almost a year now, but here it is:

http://www.myspace.com/frankkogan

and here is its blog:

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll&friendID=76037354

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

I'm curious if anyone knows what LiveJournal's business model was at the start, and what it is now - as in, how they make their money.

Long story, but Wiki has a good overview of it here. Basically:

However, as LiveJournal became more popular, Fitzpatrick was approached by multiple parties who wished to purchase it. He initially resisted many of these offers, not wanting his pet project (which he has characterized as his "baby") in the hands of those who did not understand the site's core principles — reliance on paid memberships to fund site operations, the absence of advertising, the volunteer support model, and LiveJournal's support of the free software movement.

However, since the sale to Six Apart and then to SUP, LJ has been relying more and more on ads -- see the wank over the addition of "Plus" accounts, the removal of "Basic" accounts, and the inclusion of ads when "Basic" accounts were reinstated. (Can't find the initial Basic-kill announcement post, but here's Brad Fitzpatrick's take on it, and the subsequent announcements are all up on lj_2008.)

I doubt LJ will go down completely -- it's big, it's popular, I'm sure SUP will be happy to keep running it even if US operations go down, and I'm sure someone will want it if SUP decides to give it up -- but it might change. (For the worse. SUP is like the shittiest company in the history of companies -- frankly the best thing that could happen to LJ would be SUP selling it to Google to be eaten by Blogger or something.)

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Panic not! boyofbadgers has some lj-scraping software that I'm sure we can apply to the best threads, convert them into xml format and post them up somewhere for posterity. That's what I'm doing with my journal.

[brak55.livejournal.com]

I posted this in another friend's blog, but I think it's appropriate here, too.

I personally think this is a "the sky is falling" knee jerk reaction by the general community.

Yes, LJ may be in trouble financially and laying off, but so are a LOT of other companies. The fact is that LJ is the 76th most visited site in the world, 61st in the United States and 10th most visited in Russia. This is no small potatoes.

Perhaps it just isn't being run well at the moment. I would think it would be prime real estate to be bought out before it is just shut down (and I wouldn't be surprised if it was a Russian company).

[koganbot]

You may be right, but I'm still curious how lj makes its money, since being visited a lot doesn't necessarily mean they've got a viable product (I have a feeling that many online news sources short of the NY Times or Wall Street Journal are going to go belly up in the next few years, not because they're short of site visitors but because they can't get people to click on ads, hence can't sell ads).

Just what is it that livejournal sells.

We should be thinking of alternatives anyway, since various defects in comparison to ilX - especially nested comments and no "updated threads" notification within a community - make lj hard to use for what we're trying to do on poptimists. (Of course, going back to ilX is an option, but that site has just become so big and full of bores that it's become unwieldy.)

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

ADS. IT SELLS ADS. READ MY EFFING COMMENT THAT I POSTED NEARLY TWO HOURS AGO.

Actually, it sells a combination of ads to advertisers and services to users (paid accounts, additional userpics, etc.) but SUP (the Russian company which owns the US-based LiveJournal, Inc.) has spent the past year alienating vast swaths of the userbase -- so I would guess that services aren't selling quite as well as they used to, and I would also guess that is related to this round of layoffs. (Which would really suck, because it would mean that the LiveJournal, Inc. staff is essentially taking the fall for SUP's shite business practices).

I think a typical message board might be best for what you want out of poptimists; the problem there is that some people (i.e., me) might get lazy about checking that on top of all the other sites they check throughout the day.

[koganbot]

Er, yes, I read your post and wasn't speaking that clearly here; what I meant was how do they get the revenue out of ads that the other Internet sites (except the real high-volume sites such as Google) have trouble getting, given that so few website visitors click on ads. (I think an answer might be that they don't get many people clicking on ads at all, but given that they have to pay nothing for content, only for upkeep, the small number of clickers has been enough to lj going. But I'm just speculating.)

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

I think the free content helps, as does the additional income from user services -- which is probably pretty significant, given that LJ was able to run on that alone for so long.

Also, do you think they get paid per click? I assume they sell ads at set rates based on page views, the same way print publications (and Gawker Media, yeah?) do.

[brak55.livejournal.com]

There are many ad programs where a user does not have to click for the site to gain income. I work through one program on my site/blog that pays per thousand impressions and then additional if clicked. With about 10 to 11,000 impressions a month, I'm not making great money but it beats writing for free.

[koganbot]

The thing is, a lot of poptimists fled devoted less time to their previous message board, going to poptimists as an alternative. I wonder if there's a way to combine the best of livejournal and the best of a message board (people having their own journals but the communities given more and better message-board capabilities).

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

You mean ILX? That's because ILX is crap. I mean a proper message board that doesn't look like a lo-fi forum archive.

[edgeofwhatever.livejournal.com]

Also, I agree with braak55's comment -- there are a lot of users and a lot of content here, and odds are somebody would want to buy that.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

haha we could ask for our own private sub-board on ilx!!