(no subject)

[charmian]

If you use NoScript, you may be facing some issues with Dreamwidth: http://dw-nifty.dreamwidth.org/7596.html?style=mine

Also, a poll on paid features and some notes about the state of Dreamwidth as a business have been published on dw_biz:

http://dw-biz.dreamwidth.org/4516.html


I was surprised how popular a bound book was among the people answering the poll. I guess I've never really harbored any desire to have a bound copy of any of my journals, as of my posts contain errors or outdated information etc.

I was also surprised that more people clicked that they bought a paid account because they wanted to support DW than that they did because they wanted the features. (On the other hand, the poll is not very representative of DW as a whole because obviously, free users vastly outnumber paid users, and this is not reflected in the results.) For me, it makes sense to click that option because I am not integrating my usage of DW with LJ, and thus many of those features are not useful; also, I only use one icon regularly, so that I have a hundred icons is irrelevant to me. (Actually, this is one thing I dislike about DW's pricing. I know that icons are one of the most expensive things, so I view charging $35 dollars for a package including a hundred of them is a fair price. But I wish I had an option to be a paid user, but buy fewer icons. In that respect, LJ's practice of having icon add-ons makes more sense to me.)

I think in some ways, ever since the advent of Disqus and IntenseDebate, as well as FB Connect and Twitter login, Web 2.0 services are little by little chipping away at some of the advantages of the LJ commenting system. However, no widely used service that I can think of allows a multiple icon system like Livejournal. This, I think, one of LJ's key competitive advantages.

On the last question, a plurality of users picked increased integration with other services as the most attractive feature. This was unsurprising to me, as recent discussions I've had often focused on how important integration was to DW users.


Also, it looks like Mark has created a demo of an image posting system. See it here

Comments

Poll

[frith]

I expressed interest in the book-form idea, but before I'd implement it I'd have to seriously prune my journal and rehost images from lj scrapbook to Flickr. As for why I'd buy a paid account chiefly to support DW, the options I'd lose as a free account are for the most part not that important to me, but keeping DW viable, friendly and advert-free is very important to me. I only have 3 icons and I'm sure 15 would be more than enough for me, but I _do_ like it that paid users can have up to 100 icons. I might not take advantage of all the icon slots available to me, but I do take advantage of people providing content for me to read. If small, unobtrusive gimmicks like 100 icon slots can attract entertaining content providers, I'm all for it.

[holyschist]

For me none of the paid features are absolute must-haves. But I know that a) free features I already love, b) future paid features I want have, and c) no ads mean the site has to be funded somehow, so I view it as supporting the site as a whole for all its features rather than buying the specific paid features for myself (some of which are nice, mind! But I could live without them).

Re: Poll

[charmian]

Well, the thing about the paid user stuff for me is that LJ charges $25/yr for their paid features, including 30 icons, and for $10 dollars more, you can receive a hundred icons. So if people are choosing primarily on features, then $35 dollars for paid features+100 icons isn't really that different, I think. It's just not really a gimmick or unobstrusive (a $10 price difference and 70 icon difference isn't), IMHO, but an obvious and deliberate policy. (Not that there is anything wrong with that). I get the logic of bundling and such, but it's kind of like if one cable company allows you to buy a fifty channels, and if you want to pay extra, you can get a hundred or two hundred, and another company offers the same channels, but their smallest package is a hundred channels.

[charmian]

Actually, I'm not surprised about the reasons people might want to buy a paid account to support the site, I'm just surprised that so many people don't find the features sufficiently appealing, unless they never found the features sufficiently compelling on LJ.

[holyschist]

I suspect that's the case. I had a paid LJ account for quite a while because I liked the features, but then lack of money and grumpiness about LJ led me to lapse, and I did fine without them.

Flickr, by holding photos hostage, pretty effectively guarantees I will keep giving them money unless I find a site I like better or decide the drawbacks are worth self-hosting. So they get my money, but it's not a great way to encourage customer loyalty.

[charmian]

Yeah, IIRC for freemium the normal rate is that only about 5% max of users buy premium features, and usually it's closer to 2%. But in the poll it seems that most of the respondents are paid users, so I guess the free folk must not be responding for some reason.

I've heard people like smugmug? But what do you mean by 'hostage'? (improper business practices?) Do you mean they won't let you export your files?

[holyschist]

Yeah, there is no good built-in export, although there are third-party clients that do a decent job now.

Actually, while I find that skeevy (although with the fact that they're owned by Yahoo, which has very questionable business practices in their web host division), the big reason I keep renewing is so I can have more than three sets of photos and all my photos will remain visible. They have come up with a way to make the free service just useful enough to get people to sign up, but not useful enough to make it viable for a heavy user. Eventually I will probably jump ship for another alternative, although I do really like the community.

The blogging equivalent would probably be to make free users' posts invisible after one year, and not provide a data export tool. Paid users entries would all be visible, but they still wouldn't have a data export tool. I don't know of any blogging service that does this.

[charmian]

The export thing is unfortunate, but IMHO, the making the free service useful enough to get people to sign up, but not useful enough to make it viable for a heavy user is not unethical. In fact, IIRC that's what a lot of businesses strive for.

Probably blogging services don't do this because there is a) competition (from what you say, there doesn't seem to be viable competition to Flickr? They do it because people let them get away with it... ), and b) it costs much less to host text.

[holyschist]

the making the free service useful enough to get people to sign up, but not useful enough to make it viable for a heavy user is not unethical

Oh no, I don't think it's unethical at all! Not providing an export option so that in order to maintain access to your photos (and metadata) you need to a) keep renewing forever, b) manually download everything individually, which quickly becomes impractical, or c) rely on a third party program does bother me, though.

Probably blogging services don't do this because there is a) competition (from what you say, there doesn't seem to be viable competition to Flickr? They do it because people let them get away with it... ), and b) it costs much less to host text.

a), probably. There are other image hosting sites, but I don't think any of them have anywhere near the established community at this point. I haven't seriously looked yet. b), I'm not sure. Flickr keeps all the photos on its servers, it just won't let you or anyone else view older ones if you're a free user. So there's probably saving in bandwidth due to people not viewing those photos, but they're still taking up server space.

I suspect there's also some element of the difference between blogging communities (which can consist of self-hosted blogs, blogs on many different services, etc.) and photo communities, which I think tend to rely more on being on a single site.

[charmian]

Yeah, I hope that Flickr is more upfront about these things in the future. So most people delete their photos and do not keep a copy of them on their hard-drives, I gather?

a) Hmm, if it's for the community that people are staying rather than because of the difficulty in downloading, that's somewhat of a different issue. b) Actually, from what I've heard, server space is not really a problem; the real problem is the bandwidth.

Huh, so why cannot a photo community be distributed, if it is not an issue of private photographs?

[holyschist]

So most people delete their photos and do not keep a copy of them on their hard-drives, I gather?

I have no idea what most people do, but I think partially it's that people may want to preserve metadata. Some people probably use their Flickr account as a backup (I don't, since there are so many ways to circumvent their download protection and so many people who think it's not theft if they credit--I don't upload full-res images anymore).

a) I think it's probably some combination of factors, but I only know why I have issues with Flickr in some respects but stay anyway. b) Not surprising.

Huh, so why cannot a photo community be distributed, if it is not an issue of private photographs?

I think it's some combination of private photographs--communities often have "friends-only" type settings for photos, and Flickr's not unique in that--group stuff like communities and photo pools and favorite sets that are easier to participate in if everyone's using the same service, the ability to add photos to favorites to look at later, etc. Many of these would be much more difficult and possibly impossible in a more distributed photo community.

[charmian]

Hmm, but that argues that even if Flickr DID allow a download, it wouldn't matter much because where would the users upload them? They would need to find another software/website which recognized the metadata formats.

Sounds like the same problem re: social networking. A lack of interoperability and open, widely used formats.

[holyschist]

I guess it depends on why the users want to keep the metadata. And it might be something that could be put into a generic XML format and then converted or even uploaded as-is. I don't know.

[holyschist]

Here's an interesting discussion about Flickr Pro accounts: http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer/331e0f78/does-anyone-know-what-percentage-of-flickr

It suggests that they form a much larger percentage of site activity than they do of total number of accounts. And I suspect the same is true of the poll in dw_biz--the most active site users and the users most likely to watch dw_news and dw_biz probably have a greater percentage of paid users than the site as a whole, and probably generate a greater percentage of activity and content than their percentage of accounts would suggest.

Hmmm. This is some data I would really like to see:

-Percentage of paid users
-Percentage of posts made by paid users
-Percentage of comments made by paid users
-Percentage of paid users watching dw_biz
-Percentage of paid users watching dw_news

[holyschist]

A casual study with some interesting results:

http://www.thejuicycow.com/2007/08/29/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-flickr-but-were-afraid-to-ask/

Flickr

[frith]

This whole Flickr discussion has me confused. I use Flickr to host pictures I display in my posts on LJ and DW as well as in the Endless Forest forum. I don't pay for any of my Flickr accounts and the one account that got paid for by a stranger I let lapse. The 200 images on my Flickr accounts are still visible years later. I never exceed 200 images since if you exceed 200 images, only the 200 latest images remain visible. So I just open a new account. Problem solved.

Re: Flickr

[holyschist]

I suspect most people do not want to end up with half a dozen (or more) accounts. I took about 4000 photos (once I sorted out the actively bad ones) last summer alone. Even if I took fewer, having multiple accounts would annoy the hell out of me.

It sounds like you are using Flickr primarily (exclusively?) to host images for your blogs. I don't think that's how most Flickr users, especially those who get into the community aspects of the site, do.

If all I wanted was image hosting for my blogs, I have webspace for that.

Re: Flickr

[frith]

Yes, I use Flickr exclusively to host images for my blogs. I don't use the community aspects, so it doesn't bother me to have half a dozen accounts.

Re: Flickr

[charmian]

I guess that depends on what you use Flickr for. For people who use it for the organizational aspects, or for the community/privacy aspects, that solution doesn't work as well, I think. (because then you would have to put into place all of your privacy permissions again)

[charmian]

Well, if they really do have 60% of active users, they must be doing incredibly well.

I do think it's true that those tendencies apply, yet it still seems rather odd to me that it's so overwhelmingly paid/seed users answering in that poll. I mean, I would have been surprised if it were over 40% paid, but instead, the respondents are 70% paid!

[sophie]

I was surprised how popular a bound book was among the people answering the poll. I guess I've never really harbored any desire to have a bound copy of any of my journals, as of my posts contain errors or outdated information etc.

Might be worth noting, in case you didn't see it, but the scale was such that 1 meant *most* likely, and 5 meant *least* likely.

But maybe you knew that already, and were just commenting. :D The scale does seem backwards and confusing to me, though, so I thought I'd point it out.

[holyschist]

Nono, I don't think it's saying that 60% of users are active, or 60% of users are paid, but that of active users, 60% of those are paid. The paid users could still be <5% of the total users, and <10% of users could be "active".

It's really hard to nail down stats, though, since Yahoo/Flickr doesn't release them--so I think all of these estimates are based on people counting samples of recent activity and whatnot.

[charmian]

Oh, that's what I meant. If they had 60% of active users as paid. Since the inactive users don't really cost that much, (especially with 50% of photos being private), then they are doing really well. IIRC LJ paid users never were about at 3.8% of active users when Six Apart bought the company.

[holyschist]

I guess it depends on how the person counting defined "active"--probably based on some sample of "latest photos", so it might bias more towards super-active users. I suspect only Yahoo could get a true count of accounts with activity in the last year or whatever.

[holyschist]

I was thrown off by the scale, too.

[charmian]

Huh... whoops then. 0_o Well, either way, it is still a high amount of people, higher than I would have expected.