The LJ Business Plan

Does anyone remember the heyday of GeoCities? That loverly free server which allowed you a certain amount of free webspace in exchange for letting them slap whatever advertising they want to on it? Why did that site work, and why was it made obsolete?

Geocities worked because it was free. Pure and simple. If you want to get people using your product, the trick is to make it affordable. It's why the Xerox company sells its copiers for less than it costs to make them: you want to get people using your product.

But that analogy hints at why Geocities died off. Geocities was free, but relied on flashy and trashy advertising. Eventually, people decided it wasn't worth the hassle, and so you see far fewer active sites that work on this principle. Geocities had to serve both random advertisers (whose banners might appear on *any* sort of website) and the people who would be providing content (us plebians), and matching the twain was no easy feat.

Now, we still see free sites with advertising, but they're generally more focused: sites like FaceBook which have a fairly concentrated *raison d'etre* and who can therefore sell advertising in a much more concentrated and focused manner. What about the other sites, the ones that are still fairly open and modular?

Well, I'm going to go to and even *more* focused website for the answer. There is a comic by Phil and Kaja Foglio (people worth looking up if you're interested in high-quality and amusing illustrations) called "Girl Genius." Originally, it was only available in print form. Then they offered the first section of the first comic online, as a teaser. I'm inferring that sales rose, because they transferred to putting up the entire back archive of the comic online at a rate of three pages per week, just like a webcomic; they also have more recent comics updating on the same schedule (until they get through the backlog of the archive, of course, at which time it will only be the new pages).

Phil Foglio mentions why in his LJ: it's the new business model. Give away your product for free, and let people pay to have it in some other form. Want to read Girl Genius online? Go for it! Want to catch up with the storyline immediately? Buy the comics. Really like reading it, maybe you'll buy a copy for yourself.

And so we finally bring things right back to this very LiveJournal: LJ follows pretty much exactly the same business model. Take a journal. Put whatever the hell you want in it, and get all your friends to read it and encourage them to start their own free journals. You'll get one hell of a lot of freeloaders, but you'll also make LJ a big thing in the world where people start caring about it. So for every dozen or hundred journals that're just people whining about how crappy life is, you get a few where people really care about what they're saying and about reaching their audience. And so you get people who're willing to shell out money for the same product but with better features, because their journal/blog/erotic stories page is just that important to them.

With the internet comes freedom. Sorry, that's not quite right: with the internet comes free stuff. And the best part is, the business plan of the company *requires* the freeloaders like myself! How awesome is that?

And you know what's even better? My LJ is just text: I don't even format it! I'm immune, because I don't have the slightest desire for the shiny extra bells and whistles!