Some reactions so far [LWN.net]

Some reactions so far

Posted Sep 29, 2005 19:39 UTC (Thu) by Alan_Hicks (subscriber, #20469)
In reply to: Some reactions so far by corbet
Parent article: An LWN status update

Subscription levels: I suppose we could always implement a higher level, though I already feel bad that we don't really have much to offer the project leaders now. Somebody asked about distribution: approximately 18% starving hacker, 76% professional hacker, 7% project leader.

I'm frankly proud to be a "project leader" subscriber. When I chose to subscribe I thought this site's content was easily worth $10 a month, and I was by no means long on cash at the time. If you consider a higher tier of subscriptions, allow me to make these suggestions:

Starving Hacker International (intended for readers in countries where $5 USD per month is still a substantial amount of money): $2.50
Starving Hacker: $5
Professional Hacker: $10
Uber Geek: $20

That gets out the idea that $2.50 levels are geared towards those type of people specifically unable to afford $5 a month because no one in their area makes enough to pay that.

Early on, the starving hacker and project leader levels had almost equal numbers of subscribers, but that has changed over time.

Is that because you've gained starving hackers at a faster clip than project leaders, or have project leader subscriptions fallen? Here's one option to increase your number of project leaders: LWN mailing lists.

LWN mailing lists could be as simple as an e-mail on the most recently published article as they came up. This could even be offered to the $5 professional hackers. $10 memberships would also get access to LWN mailing lists on a variety of topics, like say desktops, servers, clustering, or just one general LWN-discussion mailing list. I suspect that your $10 subscribers are among the best and brightest in the community, and having such a mailing list to ask questions that don't easily fit in other places is a valuable tool.

For at least a couple years now I've been a subscriber to the slackware-OT mailing list, a mailing list that the best and brightest Slackware users of the newsgroup alt.os.linux.slackware have all subscribed. It is undoubtably the best all-around reference for any linux questions I have ever had. Such a mailing list that only LWN $10 subscribers could join would likely be a major boon for them and encourage higher fee subscriptions. You could keep this in everyone's mind by including sumaries of important discussions on the mailing list in the weekly paper just like you do for the LKML.

(Log in to post comments)