[info]darkrose in [info]07refugees

Ah, LJ: will you never learn?

Apparently not, since their latest idea is to allow users to have their entire journal "sponsored" by an advertiser, in exchange for running a banner ad in the userinfo and "subtle" branding.

But remember, kids--three account types is too confusing! So...we'll take away Basic and add...a third account type!

Actually, I'm thinking fandom could have a lot of fun with this. Create a sockpuppet journal, and for the initial "trial period", post nothing but pictures of kitties and cookie recipes. Then, once the trial is over and you've shown yourself to be a good corporate citizen, go back to posting the porn: sponsored by Pepsi!

Posted on Mar. 28th, 2008 at 04:19 pm | | Leave a comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend

Comments


[info]elfwreck

The sponsor can refuse to sponsor an account, and the account would lose its "paid feature" aspects--the extra icons, storage space, comment editing, increased tracking, and so on.

I don't think they're planning on giving any editing/filtering options to the sponsors, just the ability to yank their sponsorship if they don't approve of the account.

To make a protest effective, there'd need to be a whole swarm of people grabbing the same sponsor (it seems there'll be several to choose from), and posting squicky and anti-sponsor messages, and then going out of their way to notify the sponsor of how their name/logo are being used. (And then, when the sponsorship is pulled, move on to the next sponsor.)

However, given the number of Russian users who will very likely be just fine with the sponsor-paid accounts, it's not likely to make any difference to LJ; SUP has basically announced "we're doing this for the Russian blogging crowd who use LJ as a professional resource; you open-source activist fanatics can move along to another service now. You built it, but we bought it, and it's ours now."
Posted on Mar. 29th, 2008 05:06 pm (UTC) | | Parent | Thread | Reply

[info]lady_ganesh

It's weird. The only way I can see this working in the States is for the Sponsored accounts to be sold in a very targeted way. Pepsi Max doesn't have the time or energy to monitor everyone they'd 'sponsor' to make sure that Joe James from Idaho doesn't occasionally talk about murdering all the Jews in amidst his talk about boy bands and pro wrestling. (Sorry to go Godwin's so quickly!)
Posted on Mar. 30th, 2008 01:55 pm (UTC) | | Parent | Reply