ONTD move unsuccessful
Saturday, April 10th, 2010 12:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charmianYesterday, 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?
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?
