Basics and bonuses

[shewhomust]

It seems there has been a fuss over LiveJournal's decision to withdraw the Basic account option for new users; only the most distant rumblings have reached here, mostly after the event - posts appear in the f-list saying "I decided to / not to strike...". I didn't decide anything, I simply didn't hear about it beforehand, but, for what it's worth, here's my thinking.

The decision to offer, or not to offer, any type of account, is LJ's to make. But they haven't been very clever in the way they announced the withdrawal of the Basic account: I first heard about it in a news post which was already doing damage limitation. It had also been discussed in a comment on a previous news thread, which I'd missed because life is too short to read the thousands of comments on those posts - I tend to assume that if there's something I need to know, it'll be in the news, right? In this case, evidently not, so I googled it, which took me straight to Brad Fitzpatrick's post on the subject, arguing that this is the wrong decision. In PR terms, an own goal.

Yet why should LJ offer Basic Accounts? How can they afford to give away for free something that it must cost them to provide? Even before this latest kerfuffle, there's been an item on my mental 'Must post that sometime' list, about the charging structures of the various online services I use, and how the LJ model doesn't make sense. It goes like this:

There's the Flickr model: you can have a free account, upload your photos to Flickr, show them to your friends, arrange them into sets, post them in your blog - and sooner or later you run out of space, and either let the earlier photos go, or upgrade to a paid account. So you need never pay for your account, and you can tell yourself that you won't, that you'll stick with what the free account offers; but in fact, if you continue to use your account at all, you probably will end up paying for it.

Librarything is more upfront about this: you can catalogue 200 books for free, thereafter there's a charge. If you are the sort of person who catalogues their books, 200 is unlikely to be sufficient, so it's clear from the start that the free option is just a taster, to see if it works for you - if you Librarything at all, you'd better be prepared to pay for it.

I pay for my accounts on Flickr and Librarything, and I enjoy them both; but not as much as I enjoy LiveJournal, which I don't pay for. And the reason why I don't have a paid LJ account is that LJ has never offered me any incentive to. More userpics? Not really. Edit your comments? There are workarounds. Post from your mobile phone? I don't think so... The only feature that does attract me is the ability to create feeds for blogs I would like to read on my friends page - and indeed to find the feeds that often already exist, but aren't easy to search out from a Basic account - and fortunately my kind and generous friend samarcand has a Paid account and helps me out here. But if instead of offering me more and different features, LJ asked me to pay for more of the same, to maintain and expand what I already use - I'd do it, and at the present prices I wouldn't feel I was being overcharged.

Brad argues that the value of free accounts is that we provide content; maybe, but so do paid, and indeed Bonus (ie, advertising-supported) accounts. What free accounts give the company is potential customers for a paid account, a pool of people who have tried what LJ has to offer and might buy more. Do Bonus accounts serve the same function? Well, they might. I might be deterred by the advertising (which I find more obtrusive than the ads on my free Flickr account); I might feel that the bonus features (whatever they are) made an upgrade unnecessary; or, of course, my mileage might vary.

There's probably a space here for the paragraph which talks about Facebook, which goes to the opposite extreme, and won't let you try the package out at all unless you sign up. Of course, Facebook doesn't try to sell you a paid account because you aren't the customer, you're the commodity, and Facebook has already sold you to its advertisers... But that's a whole 'nother rant.

Comments

[handworn.livejournal.com]

I agree with you; this is LJ's decision to make. They were never providing free basic accounts as a public service, but as a "teaser." If they've decided it's not worth it, that's up to them.

I guess the underlying position of those decrying the move that I disagree with most is that the disruption of the community outweighs the profitability of the business. There are times when that's true in life, but the disruption would have to be enormous, and this just isn't. (For one thing, it's not forcing those who already have free basic service to upgrade, though that may be next.)

[cellio]

This is a good analysis.

When I got a paid LJ account (and, later, bought a permanent account), the lure was twofold: helping to support what was then a small non-profit venture, and access to the faster servers. It used to be that you got better performance if you had a paid account, and when LJ was small and poor and couldn't afford as much infrastructure as there was demand for, that was a good way to do it. It wasn't that they were throttling the free accounts; they were just providing a level of "express service" for the paying customers.

Most of that doesn't really apply any more, so they resorted to features that most of us don't care about. Apparently I am now permitted 142 userpics; err, what? I use voice posting maybe once or twice a year if that, and text-messaging not at all. Polls? Also rare. RSS feeds? I've created a few and it's nice not to have to worry about it, but if I couldn't create feeds my world would not end.

I'm kind of surprised that ad-supported sites are still profitable, between AdBlock and learned behavior modification. (By the latter I mean: AdBlock doesn't kill, for example, Google ads on search-result pages, but I just plain don't see them -- my eyes just automatically avoid that part of the page.)

[janni.livejournal.com]

I actually think there's a lot of merit to Brad's argument, though my main issue is with how lj handled announcing the termination of basic accounts: by not doing so until folks began to notice.

There also is the fact that when lj began doing ads, it was with the understanding that free accounts wouldn't ever go away, so I understand why long-time users are feeling a bit betrayed.

(I've had a paid account for years myself, because I use lj so much I felt I should support it, though I don't know that I get anything more, save for the fun but not worth paying for ability to make polls.)