Earlier this week, LiveJournal added ads to their site. They did it with a lot of care and advance notice (Brad, the founder, alerted his users that this was coming over a month ago). Not surprisingly, the comments on these posts are mixed. A lot of them are curious and supportive, but quite a few are negative and blame the 6A acquisition for this change.
Previously LJ had only two types of accounts: Paid and Free. If you have a Paid account you get extra features (like more userpics, voice posts, etc.). To fit in the ads LJ has added a new account level, Sponsored. If you opt-in then you get additional features (though not as many as a Paid account), you get ads, and your readers get ads. If you are a Paid user you never see ads on the site. Free account users only see ads on the content pages of Sponsored users. Here’s a page that details the features for each account type.
I’ve been an LJ user for years. Curious, I immediately logged in to my account and added myself to the program. I was asked to select my interests for better ad targeting. I chose tech and wireless. I had kind of forgotten about it until i saw a banner ad on one of my pages the next day. On my journal and on my friends page there were Google contextual ads. I didn’t mind the contextual ads, but the banner ads on the admin pages were unnecessary. If I have come to LJ to make a post, I don’t want to look at Anti-Spam ads. I’m not sure that I will stay in the program as I don’t think that I will use that many of the features and i’m just not *that* curious what Google ads will come up for my friend’s posts.
I might be tempted to stay in the program if the ads were rev-shared and they removed the annoying banner ads. It’s their platform and they’ve created a wonderful community, but it’s still my content. It’s my content making a buck for them and I don’t get to share. On Blogger I can put up my own Google ads, on MSN Spaces I can use Kanoodle. Why can’t I do that on LJ? Perhaps providing additional features to all users who rev-share would get even more money. This seems like something they should consider as I am sure that I am not the only user feeling this way.
More on this elsewhere: Valleywag has an interesting post on the changing clauses of their Guiding Principles.