It’s notoriously hard for bloggers with a limited audience to monetize the traffic generated by the content they self-publish, and LiveJournal users are no exception. Now LiveJournal has added a program dubbed ‘Your Journal – Your Money’ which should help users monetize their blogs or journals using Google AdSense.
Important caveat: only users with paid accounts are eligible for the program.
Here’s the deal: users who cough up between $5 for 2 months or $25 for 12 months of using LiveJournal, can add Google AdSense banners to their blog and keep 100% of the earnings (after Google takes their cut). They will be required to sign up for a Google AdSense account or associate an existing account to start earning revenue from displaying Google ads. Users who enter the program can control where ads appear and whether they’re text, images, or both.
What I fail to see how this deal benefits LiveJournal in any way, since they won’t be seeing a penny based on the current agreement. Perhaps it’s just a way for them to maintain its user base, considering the fact most popular blogging platforms already offer multiple ways for users to monetize their traffic.
LiveJournal has a rich history when it comes to weblog publishing. First started more than 10 years ago (on April 15, 1999) by Brad Fitzpatrick as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities, its parent company Danga Interactive was acquired by Six Apart in January 2005. Less than two years later, Six Apart announced it was selling LiveJournal to SUP, a Russian media company that had been licensing the LiveJournal brand and software for use in Russia. Fitzpatrick moved on to join … Google, which may be part of the reason behind the LiveJournal/Google advertising deal.
LiveJournal says it signed up over 22 million new users since its U.S. launch and has a worldwide monthly reach of 25 million users with approximately 7 million in Russia and 8 million in the U.S.
Kind of funny to notice Fitzpatrick hasn’t yet entered the program to start monetizing his own LiveJournal blog. Or maybe he just doesn’t have a paid account?
