ads on LJ paid comms possible now? added: ONTD cuts deal with LJ

[charmian]

Been 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 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.]

Comments

[synecdochic]

Under the traditional subscription-based LJ model, lurkers represent a drain on LJ resources, without any positive sides; I suppose with the addition of ads, lurkers can finally be monetized.

That was the entire point of adding ads,a ctually. Not for ONTD specifically, but traffic showed a horrble lurker::active user ratio.

[charmian]

Huh, really? I wonder if LJ's lurker:active user ratio was much worse than the industry, or if had then worsened from what it was in the past. But I'm not sure how an open site can avoid that, as the internet increases in size, the amount of lurkers increases dramatically, especially as people only seem to join a limited number of sites.

Does DW keep stats on that kind of thing too? Or is that not really a problem considering the different business model?

[synecdochic]

Not a problem for us! And wasn't for lj if they hadn't wanted to strike it big.