LiveJournal Introduces "Sponsored Content"

piphil writes, "LiveJournal.com has just announced via their Business Discussions journal that they are introducing 'sponsored communities and features.' This has lead to an outcry from those who watch this community, who accuse LiveJournal of starting down the 'slippery slope' towards placing advertising on users' journals — some of which users already pay for the privilege of not having to see ads on the site. Read more below."

Interestingly, a few years ago — before LiveJournal's takeover by SixApart.com — the management released a "Social Contract" stating that LiveJournal would remain advertisement-free. Unfortunately it is impossible to link to this page at LiveJournal, as it has been silently deleted. However, we can read a copy of the document on the Internet Archive.

The user outcry has so far been limited to those who actively watch the lj_biz community. However, users are employing their own "viral marketing" techniques to spread the word across the user base. Many are worried about a MySpace-like descent into user-targeted advertising.

All this comes after the user base resisted introduction of advertising-supported user accounts, which swapped paying for extra features for seeing "targeted" banner adverts on the site.

These events raise prickly issue of user rights on such websites, and the validity of "user contracts" that can be changed at will by the provider with no subsequent compensation to affected users.

Surprising

[nbannerman]

Yep, adverts are going to kill LJ; just look at Myspace, they've got ads everywhere and no-one uses that site at all... oh, wait..

Re:Surprising

[TheRaven64]

Interesting you should compare them to MySpace. When LJ started, it seemed to be full of emo teens. Since MySpace started, it seems like the signal to noise ratio of LJ has shot up...

Two parts to ads

[Todd Knarr]

I see two parts to the ads: sponsored communities and sponsored features.

The sponsored community part I don't see a problem with the ads in. Those would be communities created by a company, and the company gets to put their ads in the community. The company can already do that by an ad in a floating entry at the top of the community, all this is doing is making it official and giving LJ a cut. And it's their community in a sense, if they want ads in it it's them paying the bills. If users find the ads too obtrusive they'll avoid that community and that company and the company'll drop the community as a waste of money.

The sponsored features part I'll reserve judgement on for the moment. The statement seems to imply the ads will be on pages related to features not currently part of LJ's feature set and that'd be too expensive to offer at all without the ads. I want to see how they actually intend to implement it, because it could vary from quite acceptable to quite annoying depending on implementation.

Nowhere in LJ's announcement do I see any plans for ads popping up in ordinary user journals for paying subscribers.

Re:Adblock

[RLiegh]

...and they enforce this how, exactly?

Re:...and?

[g-doo]

Who cares? Start a similar service. There's no patent preventing you from doing so to the best of my knowledge.

Well, let's replace Blogger with the LiveJournal example. If you built up several years of posts and comments at Blogger, with years' worth of sites linking back to your own, wouldn't you be a bit hesitant to abruptly drop Blogger and essentially start over at another service?

Re:What "agreement"?

[seebs]

The agreement where, when you sign up, they tell you what their service is, and what their terms are, and post things like a "social contract" saying "WE WILL NEVER HAVE ADS".

It's not that they just by COINCIDENCE didn't have ads. It's that they said, in writing, "we will never, ever, have ads".