ads on LJ paid comms possible now? added: ONTD cuts deal with LJ
Sunday, April 4th, 2010 08:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charmianBeen scarce about these parts because a certain book has come out, and so I've been reading reviews while waiting for it to arrive in the post, but I came across an ONTD link and saw some people in the comments complaining about ads. This confused me because ONTD is a permanent community, and thus wouldn't normally have ads because the option to have ads for permanent/paid users is IIRC available only to personal accounts. (Look at it with adblock turned off: you'll see ads)
I wonder if the policy changed, or they made an exception for ONTD? (they are, after all, 100,000 members strong, and probably the largest community on LJ) So then, who does the ad money go to, I wonder? Do the maintainers split it amongst themselves equally?
EDIT: Update!
Thanks todelphinapterus, I've found out that ONTD has made a deal with LJ.
One of the maintainers of LJ has become an employee of LJ, as the 'editor of ONTD.' [EDIT: See next post for more details. It's not clear whether the mod is getting a salary or not.]
They report that ONTD members will soon get special userheads (I guess kind of like those Santa's hat ones?), that ONTD will have a dedicated server, and there will be special widgets for highlighting comments, and possibly their own domain and an iPhone app. So this is where the money's going to.
Very interesting: I guess this makes ONTD sort of like the Cyrillic LJ community drugoi, where IIRC the moderator is an LJ employee as well, and there are certain promotions (IIRC). I wonder if any other English-language LJ comms may be offered similar deals by LJ? [Possibly reflecting the trend of older internet companies to go from being tech-oriented to content-oriented companies? Yahoo! forex, or AOL.]
I wonder if the policy changed, or they made an exception for ONTD? (they are, after all, 100,000 members strong, and probably the largest community on LJ) So then, who does the ad money go to, I wonder? Do the maintainers split it amongst themselves equally?
EDIT: Update!
Thanks to
delphinapterus, I've found out that ONTD has made a deal with LJ. One of the maintainers of LJ has become an employee of LJ, as the 'editor of ONTD.' [EDIT: See next post for more details. It's not clear whether the mod is getting a salary or not.]
They report that ONTD members will soon get special userheads (I guess kind of like those Santa's hat ones?), that ONTD will have a dedicated server, and there will be special widgets for highlighting comments, and possibly their own domain and an iPhone app. So this is where the money's going to.
Very interesting: I guess this makes ONTD sort of like the Cyrillic LJ community drugoi, where IIRC the moderator is an LJ employee as well, and there are certain promotions (IIRC). I wonder if any other English-language LJ comms may be offered similar deals by LJ? [Possibly reflecting the trend of older internet companies to go from being tech-oriented to content-oriented companies? Yahoo! forex, or AOL.]
no subject
Date: 2010-04-05 11:33 pm (UTC)If ads are to be allowed, and paid/perm accounts are allowed to have their own ads, then comms should be allowed them in some way.
Interesting to see them moving forward; wonder if the 'own domain name' thing will mean they allow the proper domain mapping like they're doing for the newspapers.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-05 11:40 pm (UTC)Well, I wouldn't say that, necessarily, except from maybe an ideological standpoint.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-06 02:48 am (UTC)Well, actually I can see quite a few logistic problems associated with ads; for example, who is the 'owner' of a comm, given that there may be multiple maintainers, who all theoretically have the same status.
It would indeed be nice if LJ could straighten out that domain mapping. Now that Tumblr and Posterous are having that as a free feature, especially.