ONTD move unsuccessful

[charmian]

Yesterday, the LJ ops team attempted to move ONTD to another server, but were unfortunately unsuccessful. Also, in case you were wondering, ONTD itself isn't the source of the problems with LJ's operation, but more of a symptom; so ONTD sinking into the sea or whatever wouldn't really solve the real problem LJ faces, which is something with its architecture. Having no technical expertise in these matters, it's impossible for me to know how serious these problems really are, or how long it will take for them to resolve them.

This is pure speculation, but from what stats I can see, it doesn't really seem like the overall traffic of LJ has hugely exploded (especially from peak levels in the past), so could what it be is that the distribution of LJ traffic is what has altered? In other words, comparable numbers of people are accessing LJ, but in a more concentrated way? As people who have small scale journals decamp to FB (or Tumblr, etc), perhaps LJ usage has become far more community-oriented. (Well, some ONTD posters think this may be so)

Also, Kyle Cassidy has a post up about interstitial ads which play sounds on LJ, and why this is happening: http://kylecassidy.livejournal.com/591298.html (3rd party ad-networks, basically)

Anyway, in other social networking news, AOL is going to sell Bebo, or shut it down. Bebo, for those of you who don't know, is a social network with about 14 million monthly visitors which has mostly young people in the UK as its main audience, and it was ill-conceivedly bought by AOL awhile back for far too much ($850 million).

Although it's unclear what's going to happen, some tax experts say that entirely shutting down Bebo may make more financial sense for AOL. That's pretty tough for all of the users. 0_o In the comments, someone claiming they are a former Bebo employee has some choice words.


"There was never a lack of quality input from users OR employees, only a broken feedback mechanism and management team blindly intent on achieving goals that did more harm than good. "

"When 10 million users from AIM Pages were suddenly dumped into bebo, the management decided to simultaneously launch a new un-tested profile layout for existing users. The result was utter chaos. They actually managed to piss off two entire social networks in one week. More then half of the migrated AIM users bailed within a month… to Facebook likely. "

"Monetizing a social network is very hard without big budget direct sales paving the way. Premium advertisers bailed about as fast as the users, forcing the sales team to give up. On top of that, platform A refused to sell bebo inventory, because AOL never gave them an incentive or reason to help sell bebo! It costs about 20 million a year to run bebo, which has not been profitable since right after the sale. AOL thinks bebo is still worth $75-100M. Even if AOL sells bebo for $75M, the buyer would be stuck $95M in red the first year and they would have to hire quite a few people since the current staff is just a skeleton of a team. "

Yow, so it costs that much to run a site of that size?

Comments

[holyschist]

I dunno, I think ONTD members who don't use LJ for journaling are the last people who would know if other people still are.

My corner of LJ is still very active on the journaling front, with mildly active smaller communities--although granted, when I went through and removed everyone cross-posting to DW, it turned out that a majority of them moved to DW as their primary home. But there are hugely active more journaling-focused parts of LJ still, I think, and my impression is that this is true of the Russian userbase as well.

[charmian]

Yeah, I thought it was interesting for what that showed about how ONTDers perceive LJ usage.

Oh, what led you to form that impression about the Russian userbase?

[holyschist]

Hmmm, I'm not sure it's anything specific, but I don't know of any ONTD-size community, and from what I've read of it, it sounded more like personal/political than community bloggers. But since I'm not part of the Russian LJ community, I may well be entirely wrong.

I do think that just looking at Russian LJ or "The rest of LJ" separately gives a skewed picture of the company at this point.

[foxfirefey]

This is pure speculation, but from what stats I can see, it doesn't really seem like the overall traffic of LJ has hugely exploded (especially from peak levels in the past), so could what it be is that the distribution of LJ traffic is what has altered? In other words, comparable numbers of people are accessing LJ, but in a more concentrated way? As people who have small scale journals decamp to FB (or Tumblr, etc), perhaps LJ usage has become far more community-oriented. (Well, some ONTD posters think this may be so)

One thing to consider is that LJ has more features than it used to. And even if active members haven't increased much, external viewership has probably increased some--and because external viewership is interested most in the most popular places, like ONTD, that increases their already out-of-bounds load on the weakest points.

[charmian]

Oh yeah, I hadn't bothered to consider whether external viewership had increased, but why do you think, outside of places like ONTD, that external viewership has globally increased? Simply because the size of the internet has increased? Because search has improved?

[foxfirefey]

Well, I think the Russian side of LJ is growing at a pretty fast pace and that SUP knows how to handle that cultural part of LJ with excellent integration into their other Russian media properties. And the overall traffic on the internet has increase some, yes. Also, the horrible spam problem--because LJ is becoming more popular in Russia, it has also attracted more Russian spammers, and battling with them has been taking up lots of energy and resources.