Back in December of the last year, when the Russian company SUP bought LiveJournal, I wrote this post, in which, among other things, I said that it wasn’t a very good thing for LiveJournal. A few things happened since then, which confirmed my worries. But the biggest of them is unfolding right now.
SUP removed basic (free) accounts from the registration form. They have also introduced plenty of annoying advertising to existing free accounts. Lots and lots of people got really annoyed with that. In fact, there even was a boycott with some users not updating their diaries for 24 hours, while others going as far as deleting their diaries (no worries yet, since there is a way to restore the diary).
If you missed this whole story, here is a CNews article in English and here is a Lenta.ru article in Russian which cover the basic story. For more, check numerous posts on the blogosphere.
Most of the people I know, saw it coming. And this is surely not the last incident in this story.
Come on. Adblock was invented for such situations. Moreover, business is business. If you want to have something good, you have to pay for it. These are laws of modern world.
I am, as LJ user, expected it and i am not surprised at all. Basically, it is the biggest step of internet commercialization.
Tiamat,
Adblock is a nice piece of software, but it’s not a panacea. First of all, it’s far from perfect regarding blocking of ads. Especially those that use dynamic URLs and image sizes. Secondly, there are way too many people who haven’t heard of Firefox, let alone Adblock.
Regarding the business point that you are making, I think, it’s totally off. Take a few moments and read what other people are saying about the whole situation. There many opinions out there, ranging from a mere disrespect to service users (as in Service License Agreement), to an unfair business (after all, most of LiveJournal content is generated by its users, which are not getting paid for it). There are other businesses competing to LiveJournal, and who are doing way better than LiveJournal. For some reason, they cherish and tender free user accounts (think WordPress, et al). And that is not because they are such nice guys, but because it makes all the business sense. After all, they say “content is the king of the Web”, and you won’t get much content by closing down free accounts and abusing the rest with annoying ads.
As regards the contents which is not paid for…
I use a free LJ account meaning that I do not pay for it, so I don’t see any problem if occasional ads pop out on my LJ page and I’m not get paid anything back. Say, this is a normal business-like consideration. Nothing offensive ‘d been spotted over there yet.
Lana,
usually, before you are signed up for the service, you need to agree to some terms and conditions. This is both for your good and for the good of the service provider – so that both stand on the common ground on where and what they expect of each other. If your service provider expects to get paid off of your content, they should mention so, because, even if you use their service to publish this content, that doesn’t mean that you grant them all the rights to use that content in any way they please. Maybe for your specifically that’s not a problem, but there are enough people out there who feel sensitive about these issues.