LiveJournal Introduces "Sponsored Content" 98
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.
Oddly enough (Score:4, Insightful)
At least LJ is admitting to it.
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Funny how there wasn't a word spoken officially when he got canned a short while ago.
It's good to be a pessimist (Score:3, Informative)
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LJ copyright? (Score:2)
No. (Score:1)
When to introduce advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
...and? (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Use facebook to social network
2) Use blogger
3) User the facebook notes feature to aggregate your blog in (if blogger is supported... if it isn't you could use the facebook API)
Of course, facebook uses ads on their site...
Also, it's not a step towards ads embedded in your LJ. If you want all of the features, you either pony up some cash or get ads embedded (I don't think that the "sponsored" level gets as much as the paid level).
Who cares? Start a similar service. There's no patent preventing you from doing so to the best of my knowledge.
Hmmmm.... (Score:3, Funny)
What's your email address? We'd like to discuss this idea with you further.
Thanks.
- SixApart
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Nevermind that to see the ads, you actually have to go and search them out, since the banners are in the community pages themselves, or you get them if you decide to use those newfangled features. It's all opt-in.
There was also an uproar when they introduced Plus accounts, which were also introduced as opt-in, and have so far remained that way. I don't see anyone complaining about those now, and even though I have a few friends with Plus accounts I've yet to see a single ad from them.
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The accounts are opt-in, but seeing ads most certainly isn't: A free user (or non-LJ user) will see ads on the sponsored account, even though this user hasn't ever opted in. Only paid users don't ever see ads.
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4) It's free software. Set up your own damn LJ (with blackjack, and hookers. In fact, forget the LJ!).
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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?
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LJ and Facebook are completely different sites. I don't use LJ to "social network", I use it as a diary that my friends can read. For that matter, I don't use Facebook to "social network", I use it to see what people from high school and college are up to now -- in other words, I'm on it for the profiles. I have no interest in blogging, or saying anything to the internet at large. I wish people would stop assuming that the only use for web services is whatever trendy marketi
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By setting up profiles that link you to your other friends, you are helping to produce such a graph, whether you like it or not. I used the term "social network" to capture the larger picture of what the site is and does, not to sound
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Even if you didn't want it, it's there... any complete solution to the problem of duplicating LJ's functionality would require supplementing this functionality. That's all that I was saying.
Adblock (Score:2, Insightful)
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You understand and agree that some or all of the Service may include advertisements and that these advertisements are necessary for LiveJournal to provide the Service. You also understand and agree that you will not obscure any advertisements from general view via HTML/CSS or any other means.
I would say that means the people with live journal pages cant embed things to make the advertising go away. If you are reading a page they couldn't do anything about that.
That being said
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Scandal! (Score:2, Funny)
I will continue to...not...use...livejournal...
- RG>
Surprising (Score:3, Interesting)
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I told some friends about the site and a few people moved there, but for a while it seemed pretty
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My personal opinion is that both sites are crap. While most people I know have a MySpace account, very few I know actually use it in any real manner.
Both sites could go swirling d
Just goes to show... (Score:1)
As a user of Adblock Plus (mit Filterset.G!), I'm not really concerned about any advertisements that LJ puts out. As an occasional LJ user, I really have no problem going through my few posts, copying them to local storage and moving them to a new service in the event that it descends into the puddle of diarrhea that Myspace currently has a lock on.
So what: Slashdot beat them to it! (Score:2, Insightful)
Wait a minute.... (Score:1)
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"Social contract" (Score:2)
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I think that this would be different if MS suddenly decided to GPL windows because now they think freedom and open source is important. Similarly if the RIAA continued to force people out to pay up on dubious claims based on legal might... I wonder if you would say that they have "a moral resp
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So if I decide to change my mind on the practice of "eating of small children" it isn't a bad thing?
But I think the point of the matter was that these people said they would not change their minds. Which is still lying.
If they had said... Right now we aren't going to use ads, but later we may do so then they broke no promise.
And yes... When you break a promise, it is a bad thing.
Unless of course that promise was t
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"Social Contract" has become "Guiding Principles" (Score:1)
Notice how "Stay Advertisement Free... we promise to never offer advertising space in our service or on our pages..." changed to the much more formal and significantly less friendly "Avoid Spam... when you sign up for the Service, we understand that to mean you want to communicate with us and hear from us about our products and services..."
Slippery slope indeed. Livejournal, take a look back up that slope to where you started. It's a nice plac
OMG (Score:1)
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Are you new here?
(Slashdot far outdoes LiveJournal in terms of complaining about what company X has done.)
LJ isn't for advertising. (Score:2, Insightful)
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a) I see nothing from the ads, they pay our hosting. We make no profit, we don't pay staff to write.
b) Our ads are only by record labels whose bands we feature, the point being that our audience is likely to care about the records being advertised. I couldn't care any less about Warner Bros latest movie when I'm trying to read my friend's blog, for example.
c) We've had ads for quite a while now and weren't bought out by a larger company to implement them (our hosting needs just becam
Two parts to ads (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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Sponsored communities are bad because they look just like ordinary communties until you go look at them. I didn't pay to look at advertising. If someone on my friends page links to the stupid sponsored community, I'll end up going there and looking at the advertising. I pay LJ. I pay cold hard cash. I have a lot of data on their site. I have a big investment in them. It really annoys me that now there will be advertising there I can stumble across. I would never have started a blog on a site with ad
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Also, there are concerns about not being able to
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Actually, that might be against the TOS:
You agree to NOT use the Service to: Engage in commercial activities within LiveJournal or on behalf of LiveJournal without prior approval. This incl
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I'm presuming that sponsored communities won't have the same TOS as paid individual users. And as far as I can tell, if you're logged in as a paid user you do not get the sponsored-community promo on the main page or search results. Those are strictly shown to free users.
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Well sponsored communities will be allowed under the current TOS, as it's with "prior approval". But I presumed you were referring to doing it via normal communities, by saying it can already be done.
And as far as I can tell, if you're logged in as a paid user you do not get the sponsored-community promo on the main page or search results. Those are strictly shown to free users.
Yes, that's what I said.
Always Read the TOS! (Score:1)
ADVERTISEMENTS AND PROMOTIONS
LiveJournal.com has decided to remove all banner advertisements and promotions on LiveJournal.com journals. However, LiveJournal.com reserves the right to run advertisements and promotions on the LiveJournal.com service in the future. By using LiveJournal.com, you agree that LiveJournal.com has the right to run such advertisements and promotions with or without prior notice, and without recompens
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I've been a paid user for 5yrs. The whole reason I got sucked into this community was because of their stance against ads and sponsers and anyone doing anything to control them. At the time, it was Brad and a few others struggling with servers and outages and there were less than 50,000 of us and it felt like a real community.
Now it's over 10 million
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I've been a paid member for quite some time (though not as long as you -- I started at LJ in 2002) myself, and I agree that it is unfortunate that they are going down this road. Given what I saw back in 2000 (I had a couple friends on the service back then), it was a community like
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When I started with LJ, there wasn't a great deal of teenage drama. In fact, I'd say that 90% of the users were in their mid-to-late twenties... Now Six-Apart is telling me that I'm a teenager to be exploited...
Brad had said several times that the small percentage of paid users and permanent accounts were plenty to cover their costs and pay their salaries and have a little left
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Oh well, all things change in time, and I suppose I can always get a DeadJournal...
To give you an idea of why lj users are upset (Score:2, Insightful)
I'll admit I'm irritated at this. Frankly, more irritated than the news itself deserves. The features themselves are (both) things that could be nice, but both have the potential to mostly just irritate me. And judging by lj's recent history, I judge the latter more likely than the former.
Ever since Six Apart bought lj, they've been adding features, and shoving them down the throats of the users without paying much attention to their complaints. Or any. There was the Sponsored+ account (which, incide
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And what's the problem with free users seeing ads on Sponsored+ journals? From a practical standpoint, that's the only way to make Sponsored+ work. From a principles perspective, it's reasonable. A free user (Sponsored+ or not) isn't paying for their access in money. Having to see ads in journals of people who've opted to allow them doesn't seem unreasonable to me, it's the trade-off you make for having a journal without having to pay money. If you don't want to see those ads, write LJ a check for a paid ac
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over reacting... (Score:3, Insightful)
The only time you see sponsorship information if you are a paid user is on the sponsored community/features pager - neither of which you have to use. There are always going to be problems with viral marketing - atleast here you will be able to see clearly which communities are sponsored and which are not. There will doubtless still be viral marketing with comapnies making communities that look like they are grassroots stuff but just like lonelygirl the lesson is learn to use discretion. Or don't join them at all.
whatever (Score:3, Informative)
-Brad, creator of LJ, in what is now the top post on lj_biz, citing miscommunication between coding and advertising folks.
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The problem isn't the ads, per se. (Score:2)
We know, now, that they will change their minds and break promises if they feel the "need", defined very loosely. You cannot rely on a statement that LJ will do, or not do, a given thing; even if it's in writing, they can just d
What "agreement"? (Score:2)
This is the thing I don't understand here. The Slashdot write-up says:
A contract, fundamentally, is a two-sided deal. There must be something in for both parties, or there is no contract. Any promise made to you by a business that has nothing in it for them is not a promise you should ever trust.
I will nev
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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".
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Which is a promise worth about the paper it's printed on if you're not paying (or otherwise compensating them) for their service. That's exactly my point. You're not dealing with a person who has a conscience, subscribes to personal ethics, or lives by a code of honour. You're dealing with a business, whose primary job is to make money, and which is probably under no legal obligation
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Except lj, in my experience, has always had an extraordinary number of people with paid accounts. I used to have a paid account (that I let expire, and haven't bothered renewing at the rate they're irritating me). I'd estimate half of the people I talk to on lj have paid accounts. I watch a very large roleplay where almost every single player has at least one paid account, and some have up to six paid account, because they're playing just that many characters. (Yes, granted, they're almost certainly ins
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I will go so far as to say that I wouldn't have bought my account if they hadn't committed themselves to never showing ads on the site. I was supporting the philosophy as much as I was getting mor
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LJ is now known to be a company you should not trust with anything you don't feel you could cost-effectively litigate and win. You cannot rely on them to keep promises. If they decide to sell a book with your blog entries in it, the question is not "does their policy allow this", but "if they change their policy to allow this, do I feel I could afford the necessary litigat
OLD news... (Score:2)
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I believe that this also means they appear if you go to read/post comments on someone's journal - so yes, if someone else opts-in, free users will see the ads.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this system, but it's ridiculous that people keep claiming that seeing ads is "opt in".
It's corporate now, there's not much to do... (Score:2, Insightful)
Brad Fitzpatrick's Damage Control LJ Entry (Score:1)
Much ado about little (Score:2)
I and most of my 15 or so LJ friends have moved to the "Plus" account with paid ads inserted into our journals. We like the enhanced features.
Most importantly, we have all gotten so used to the adsense model and similar advertising placement that we simply don't "see" the ads any more. Ignoring the LJ ads is no harder than ignoring an
Lies, damned lies, and free web hosts (Score:2)