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?
who uses livejournal anymore and why would you want to pay for a service that lets you add free code to a site/blog?
add to it that adsense income has really gone down, since Google now takes over 70% revenue per click and you know what to expect… peanuts
For most people, surely they’ll only cover their costs at best at $25 for 12 months, thus saving a bit on their costs perhaps, but not attracting any new users, who would still be more likely to use Blogger as a hosted service to try to make money, or host their own WP site if they’re more dedicated to monetisation?
hm… expect to see paid membership increases but yeah they should try to get a cut from google.
Just to put things in perspective, I have a personal blog hosted on my own which gets ~2k pageviews a day. I have one banner ad on the side since I don’t want to make it too annoying, along with a google search on the side. The most of the ads are engineering related so the almonst non-existent clickthroughs could get as much as $1 (haven’t checked in a while), however, this might only generate me $60-$100 per year. You couple this with the fact that google adsense doesn’t pay out until you make $100, I would bet that many of the LJ users would sign up but never see any revenue. It would take years for them to get to the $100 mark and most might give up.
P.S. http://lolwat.net has a few NSFW images, just warning.
That’s exactly the concern that CrowdA resolves. We provide service to community sites which want to share revenues with the authors. CrowdA handles all the aspects of author account management, revenue share calculation and worldwide payouts: it’s a fully outsourced solution for site owners. Our minimum withdrawal amount is $10 and we pay through PayPal, Moneybookers and WebMoney which significantly simplifies the withdrawals.
Not every livejournal user has paid account The idea is SUP can gain some benefit by the people who will shift their accounts to a “paid” type in hope to cover their expenses
I know that, but signing up for Google AdSense doesn’t seem like much of an incentive for people to move to a paid upgrade, does it?
I’m just an ordinary staff not an official talking head and can share personal opinion only As I can see there are several reasons to do it:
but it can bring some revenue so why not
1. yes SUP hopes that it will be a stimulus for some chunk of LJ users to switch their accounts to a paid You doubt that it is an incentive I believe it is There is nothing except common sense to prove who’s right But common sense is nothing more then farfetchedness Well this is not the way SUP hopes to earn really big bucks and became a profit mogul for sure
2. This step could be a reason to hold existing paid users This is very interesting service to play with, earn some money, may be not as much as wanted to be but “little” do not means “nothing”
3. This is an opportunity to make money with content they produce, users asked for it many times, and this is the prove consumers interests are important to SUP
4. ……………
5. PROFIT
Plaxico went to prison today for shooting himself in the leg.
This never would have happened if he didn’t go to the hospital.
Well good to see someone makin money!
RT
http://www.onli...e-privacy.us.tc
This isn’t going to work… Most users on Livejournal read content through their friends page. You rarely have to go to an actual journal to read one (at least those you’re friends with)
What struck me as a paid LJ user is what LJ said in the News announcement about what you must do to make money off the ads: nothing. They said (paraphrasing) to just use LJ as you normally do, and when your friends come a’clickin’, bam! you will make money on ads they click on. It’s so not how it works. You can run any LJ user’s journal through quantcast.com to back this up: less than 1,000 trackable journals on LJ get enough visits to even entertain the idea of making money off of ads, and out of those, even less are paid accounts, and out of those, what you have left is a handful (perhaps a few hundred) blogs that might make money off of Google’s mostly pitiful payouts on low-yield, what I call “scrap” inventory. Good luck!
What LJ didn’t (but should’ve said) is “Here’s a link that explains techniques for applying the most cutting-edge SEO techniques to your journals to increase the amount of people who not only visit, but may also click on your ads while they’re there.
Ironic, too, that you pay LJ to get rid of the ads, then they offer to pay you to put the ads back on.
As to why LJ did this, Google is LJ’s biggest ad partner for ads displayed on free and sponsored accounts, so I guess to keep their biggest ad partner happy….seriously I don’t have a better answer. I had trouble years ago with a Google search result for LJ that redirected you from LJ to spam sites, but when I reported it to LJ, they told me to tell Google about it myself, and seemed miffed that I would suggest communicating such things to Google was something they should do. Money, as they say, changes everything.
HubPages.com is a free way to write and use Google ad sense. It requires no investment up front and I think it is great and just plain fun.
Also DevHub.com is a hot platform that allows people to create full fledged blogsites, AND they incorporate more ways to monetize than just adsense.
Take a look at my site I did on DevHub – then you’ll know what I’m talking about!
When we are thinking from the “Live Journal” user’s side, it is very good opportunity for Uses.
With my web page I present 2 ways to earn money, which are both separately and together useful.