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LiveJournal Says Goodbye to Unique Account Structure, Against Wishes of Advisors - ReadWriteWeb
LiveJournal Says Goodbye to Unique Account Structure, Against Wishes of Advisors
Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / March 24, 2008 10:51 AM / 10 Comments
Groundbreaking social network LiveJournal is no longer allowing new users to sign up for Basic level accounts, which traded a pared-down feature set for an ad and cost free user profile.
SUP, the Russian company that recently acquired LiveJournal, angered a substantial number of its users last week by instituting the policy before discussing it publicly and going against the advice of at least two members of the company's new high profile advisory committee.
LJ's pricing structure has long been unique among major social networks; none of its competitors allow users to avoid ads or pay for an ad-free and feature-rich account. It appears that the company has given up on that unique approach and chosen the ubiquitous ad-centric path to monetization, itself of questionable effectiveness in monetizing some social networking platforms.
LiveJournal is no stranger to controversy, it seems some fight between users and site administrators breaks out every month. It makes user relations at Facebook seem like a never-ending honeymoon. A "content strike" by LiveJournal users last week doesn't appear to have made an appreciable impact on site traffic due to being scheduled on the Friday before a major holiday. Thanks to Andrew Watson for bringing the strike, and thus the whole story, to our attention.
The new feature comparison page shows only Plus and Paid options; you can view the old feature comparison page, which details the now unavailable Basic accounts, via the Internet Archive. Current basic accounts will go unchanged but new users can no longer sign up for them.
Advisory Committee Reactions
The most recent policy change has angered at least two of the new advisory board members, however, including LiveJournal creator Brad Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick is now at Google and leads the cross-site platform effort OpenSocial works on Social Graph technologies there.
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