ONTD partners with Buzzmedia, and more on the Blogetry thing.

[charmian]

http://community.livejournal.com/ohnotheydidnt/49109184.html

ONTD announces a marketing and advertising partnership with Buzzmedia, which also does this for other well-known gossip blogs. The most interesting thing in the copy is that the site claims to have 2.6 million monthly users, which must include non-logged in lurkers, because this is more than the number of LJ active users (people with accounts, that is). The press release claims that LJ has a worldwide audience of 28 million monthly, which agrees with Google Trends. However, Google Trends also claims that the US monthly uniques is only 6.1 million (Google trends says that Russian traffic is 11 million). If this is so, then ONTD might make up a substantial portion of US traffic.

In other news, Blogetry was not in trouble for anything to do with copyright, but because some terrorist organizations had signed up for accounts and were producing articles like 'Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.' The FBI says that they didn't, however, order the entire blogging site closed down, and that the hosting provider did it on their own, which is backed up by Burst.NET's statements.

Comments

[matgb]

2.6 million monthly users, which must include non-logged in lurkers

Makes sense, the 5/15/80 thing is normally about right for bigger comms (is that the right ratio, I forget), only a tiny number will submit stories, a larger number'll comment, the majority will just read. If you're only ever going to read, why would you want an account?

And if most readers don't have an account for most sites, I suspect the proportion of ONTD readers is even higher. Not that I make presumptions about their general style or anything...

Really not keen they just zapped the whole site for a few users, regardless of what the use it for, they could do that to a site like DW just as easily. Ah well, another host to add to the "don't use" list.

[charmian]

I think that's true. Also, ONTD takes awhile to approve you as a member, so that might be further discouragement. Even still, I think they have in excess of 100,000 members. Plus, ONTD is a heavily linked site, I would think. Anyway, with this kind of traffic, I understand why LJ pays so much attention to the comm. Because it does prove a kind of conundrum as that kind of usage is not something that fits into LJ's previous freemium model.

Yeah, unless there's something we're not hearing, it sounds like serious, serious overkill.

[foxfirefey]

I don't know what the FBI expected to happen from contacting Burst.NET and not Blogetry (as the stories apparently say, it's possible that's not what happened). Burst.NET probably can't take down content selectively, their only choice is to either escalate it to Blogetry (which carries a risk of being accused of "sitting on the problem") or take down the servers.

[charmian]

It's hard to say, but I wonder why they aren't giving the servers back or at least allowing them to return the data to the users? As you say, there may be more to the story, though.

[foxfirefey]

For all we know it's because the FBI has the servers and is trying to examine the server logs or something for clues. Who knows.

My guess is Burst.NET's attitude is, dude, we are not responsible for your data and you need to back it up.

[charmian]

Is it standard practice for them to back it up? (For companies like Blogetery, I mean)