(no subject)

[pensnest]

Thank you, everyone who responded to my little poll. I must admit, I was a bit surprised by the results - I'd been expecting, you see, to find that a lot of you were Basic account holders, thus proving to me that Basic accounts are useful to me even though I don't have one, because I read so many. Instead...

For your primary LJ account:

Total responses: 56
Paid or permanent: 47 (84% !!!)
Basic: 7 (12.5%)
Plus: 2 (3.6%)

And of those, 36 (64%) have at least one additional account. The vast majority of those secondary accounts (31/36 - 86%) are Basic, with three Plus and two paid/permanent. And that's not taking into account any communities or extra-to-secondary accounts.

Well! I wonder exactly how uncharacteristic my respondents are? If other fans in other fandoms made similar polls, would they show such a strong leaning towards the paid-for? Is it because a lot of my flist have been on LJ for quite a long time? Is it age-related (yes, quite probably, as I don't think I have teenagers on my friends list)? There are all kinds of things that might factor in to this, and in any case, 56 isn't that big a sample, but still. (84%!)

So, with all kinds of provisos about sample size etc, I am pretty sure that—if it's legit to extrapolate from my flist in this way—it means fannish LJ users are *far*, *far* more likely than non-fannish users to have spent money on an LJ account. Look at that 84%! Is it simply because we're the ones who most care about having a truly personalised LJ layout? Because we're the ones who absolutely must have many userpics? I don't know what it is, but we end up being the committed users. We should be the most cherished and sought-after users.

Hmm.

I suspect, though, that SUP (and 6A) probably regard Plus users as the most valuable, because they expect to get more income from advertisers than from users. I wonder if that is true now, and if not, at what point it is expected to become true? In that circumstance, paid and permanent account holders are actually a nuisance, because they remove themselves from the pool of people who can be sold, lucratively, to advertisers.

Which is, it seems to me, a hell of a shame.

Anyway. On a completely different topic, there's this:



Apparently Terry Pratchett just donated half a million pounds to Alzheimer's research (you did know he's got early signs of the disease, yes?), and there is a move afoot for fans to match his donation and take it up to a million. Which seems like a very good move. So, have at it, folks.

Comments

[ephemera.livejournal.com]

disturbing news from elsewhere on my flist :

"Furthermore, head of one of rival projects believes that in the near future the service might also abandon paid accounts. ‘Owners of paid accounts are of certain interest to advertisers. However, under the existing scheme such subscribers see not advertising, which reduces revenue from advertising’, - thinks CNews’s source. But Sup assures that it does not intend to undertake any steps in the given direction. ‘To take such steps, the average revenue per user should exceed $25 a year (the cost of one account), which is unlikely to happen soon’, - says Anton Nosik."

I'm pretty sure us Perms are an unwelcome nuisance already, as we're no longer paying cash, but we ae inclined to be invested and mouthy ....

[pensnest]

I can only say that it wouldn't particularly surprise me to see the terms of a paid account (or, indeed, a permanent account) change in the future. If Nosik can seriously state that current users had no interest in knowing about the removal of the Basic account option, because we have not opened a Basic account for nine years - ??!! - he is very far removed from an understanding of what LJ users are and do.

:-(

[manna]

In the days when the stats showed it, before 6A took over, the proportion of Paid accounts was around 7% at the most. I doubt it's grown much these days. Some people might buy accounts to avoid seeing ads, but on the other hand, Plus accounts gives a lot of the Paid perks without having to spend money. And I think there are fewer people who pay simply because they want to support the site.

If I were SUP, when ad revenues reached $25 per head, I wouldn't cancel Paid accounts, I'd raise the prices. Then people who revert will generate equivalent ad income, and people who still want to pay will again be bringing in a premium over the ad viewers. I do expect them to start putting ads on basic accounts in the not-too-distant future, though.

Personally, I don't think that SUP will hold on to LJ for any longer than 6A did. It just isn't a big enough money-spinner to be worth while for a large, heavily profit-oriented company. I think SUP are paying too much attention to the Russian users, where LJ is the main blogging platform and where it *is* a big name. But even taking into account the current influx of new Russian users, the overall active LJ user base is still slowly shrinking. Outside Russia, LJ is a very small player, and the direction in which they're taking the service is probably going to shrink it even faster. As they lost users, they lose ad revenue.

I just hope that in the end it's sold again, rather then closed down.

[pensnest]

It would be nice to think that whoever runs LiveJournal wanted to buy *LiveJournal* rather than 'a blogging site to make money from'. Hah.

I certainly think that fannish users are looking elsewhere, and if as I suspect fannish users are among the more, hmm, dedicated LJers, it really, really isn't in the current owners' interests to keep doing things to drive us elsewhere. And yet...

From rather vague figures I've seen (eg 2% pays for the other 98@), I'd have thought 7% paid accounts would be a pretty healthy and profit-generating level for them to be at. (That's why I was surprised at the weight of paid-for accounts from the people who answered my poll.) And there are plenty of ways of nudging users into paying a little bit more, here and there - Moar Icons is a frequent cry, f'rinstance - without even attempting to go with ads. Ah well, what do I know.

I agree - I hope, as I say, that in the end LJ is bought by someone who wants to run LiveJournal, not something else.

[carta.livejournal.com]

I don't think much analysis can really come from a sample size of 56 out of millions of journal users.

[pensnest]

Oh, god, no, not with a universe of 'people who happened to click on my LJ within the last forty-eight hours or so'! But I was surprised by the results all the same, having expected more Basic and fewer paid-up responses.

[rikes]

Some newer fandoms probably have more new journals and more teenies, and therefore less paid accounts than us, but my guess would still be that fannish users are more likely to have a paid account.

[turloughishere.livejournal.com]

I think I remember reading a breakdown someone did of the fandom_counts stats and finding that the percentage of paid accounts were indeed higher than the LJ average, but I might be misremembering.

[pensnest]

I expect that as fans we are more invested in the community and communication offered by LiveJournal than the 'average' user, but logically, there must be other groups for whom these things are important too.

[pensnest]

I wonder if it depends on things like the age of the fandom and the ages of the fans involved? I expect it does, in that I'd be unsurprised to find that people in 'young' fandoms like bandslash are more likely to have Plus accounts. Old and curmudgeonly people like me are less tolerant of advertising!

[manna]

Of course, a decent adblocker with get rid of ads for free. And that's what LJ are going to find more and more people doing as they crank up the intrusive and annoying ads.

[pensnest]

It has to be a decreasing-returns proposition for advertisers, doesn't it! The more intrusively they advertise, the less notice people take.

[paperdollkisses.livejournal.com]

I didn't get a chance to vote but I'm a paid user with extra userpics. Primarily for that too. More userpics. Need more more more. Even though I use... 10. LOL.

[pensnest]

I *completely* understand the lure of more userpics! That was one of the reasons why I began paying for my LJ. I now have 142, and have the luxury of being able to upload a handful more if I want to. Except, decisions, decisions... So , even more weight in the paid-for side of the scale. If I imagined that my LJ was in any way representative of, um, anything, I'd be baffled now that there was ever any need for advertising!