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LWN advertising update IILWN recently tried a new (for us) form of advertising, known as "in-text" advertising – ads that pop up from highlighted keywords in an article. When we announced the change, it was obvious from the comments that it was a tad unpopular. Truth to tell, they started getting on our nerves more as time went on; they didn't seem quite so annoying when running it on our development systems. We have discontinued the ads; they will not be coming back. A lot of good points were made in the comments, we appreciate the time you took to make them. Our readers are (obviously) very important to us; your opinions on what works and what doesn't are always carefully considered. There were also several interesting suggestions made, we will be pondering those as we make plans. We do want to dispel one concern that we heard. We are not under an imminent threat of going under. We are proceeding with the plan we laid out in May: working on the revenue side of the business while producing the same quality of content you have come to expect. There will be other experiments along the way; some will fail, hopefully some will succeed as well. (Log in to post comments)
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 12, 2007 20:24 UTC (Wed) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link] Glad the "in-text" ads are gone. I never realized how much I read LWN while not logged in until those annoying things made it more obvious.
Thanks for listening to your readers!
-Brock
Thank you for listening! (was: LWN advertising update II) Posted Sep 12, 2007 20:37 UTC (Wed) by csigler (subscriber, #1224) [Link] As soon as I saw the in-text ads were gone, I clicked over to the subscription pages and signed up (after years of being a guest). Thanks for taking the input of your subscribers seriously, even though it may be financially painful -- for the time being.
I'd like to ask again that LWN consider a "financial status" page, if it's not too cheesy. I think that would encourage people to subscribe if/when LWN runs short of funds. This is a major resource, and many people care about it, including those who've always been too lazy to subscribe.
And, please, if you are reading this and are a guest, consider subscribing, even if it's just at the starving coder level. LWN is something we should all appreciate and support!
Thank you for listening! (was: LWN advertising update II) Posted Sep 12, 2007 21:57 UTC (Wed) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link] The problem with that sort of page is that it can lead to people subscribing *only* when dire warnings appear. It's a lot easier to plan when you have a steady income.
Thank you for listening! (was: LWN advertising update II) Posted Sep 13, 2007 0:04 UTC (Thu) by csigler (subscriber, #1224) [Link] > The problem with that sort of page is that it can lead to people subscribing *only* when dire warnings appear. It's a lot easier to plan when you have a steady income.
Thank you for the reality check :) It's too bad, but I agree with you -- that's human nature.
It strikes me that there are 3 types of consumers of this site: 1.) Those who depend on LWN and have or will soon subscribe; 2.) Those who are casual readers and might subscribe to support such an excellent work; and 3.) Those who will never subscribe (read it very rarely or will only read free content).
To some extent, subscribers subsidize group 3.). That may not be a bad thing. I think this is one of the most positive Linux-promoting (non-other-OS-bashing) sites.
I think group 2.) would more likely subscribe if they saw a need. But people should subscribe at a higher level even if there isn't a dire need. As for me, I believe Jon and the staff deserve excellent journalist salaries to pay for living expenses, medical, etc., save well for children's education and retirement, and have some left over for fun and vacation. No one should expect them to live like grad. students into old age.
What are some good ideas on getting more group 2.) readers to subscribe, or re-up at a higher level?
Thank you for listening! (was: LWN advertising update II) Posted Sep 13, 2007 4:45 UTC (Thu) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link] > What are some good ideas on getting more group 2.) readers to subscribe, or re-up at a higher level?
The most obvious way is by making most content on the site subscriber-only -- possibly permanently. Of course, that would have the effect of reducing Google search results for the site. I'm not sure how many people find LWN on Google and subscribe, though.
Thank you for listening! (was: LWN advertising update II) Posted Sep 13, 2007 12:15 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] I use Google search results from LWN on a fairly frequent basis.
Blocking Google from the site restricts *everyone*, not just
Thank you for listening! (was: LWN advertising update II) Posted Sep 13, 2007 15:28 UTC (Thu) by johnkarp (subscriber, #39285) [Link] Some sites restrict the permitted HTTP user agent of non-logged-in usersto searchbots. That would allow subscriber-only content to be indexed.
Of course, clever end users alter their user-agent to get around this, but
Thank you for listening! (was: LWN advertising update II) Posted Sep 13, 2007 6:37 UTC (Thu) by dark (subscriber, #8483) [Link] One small change that might make a difference to the level at which peoplesubscribe would be to rename the levels.
The current levels are "starving hacker", "professional hacker",
Yeah, I know it's a minor thing and it may just be a specific foible of
Thank you for listening! (was: LWN advertising update II) Posted Sep 13, 2007 18:46 UTC (Thu) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link] Please get over your need for accuracy, and kick in the extra $5 per month, if you can afford it. [Steve applies guilt:]I'm unemployed, and yet I subscribed at the project leader level. Unless you really are wondering about where your next meal is going to come from, $10/month is a trivial amount. How much do you spend on cable/satellite tv? DVDs? Coffee? Your Internet connection? Jon and the others are providing a terrific value, and deserve to make a decent living from it. Or they won't, and will eventually give up and we'll lose the resource. I wouldn't like that. Would you?
Thank you for listening! (was: LWN advertising update II) Posted Sep 13, 2007 21:37 UTC (Thu) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] Just for the record: My subscription ran out this week and I'm late in renewing it and will do so, but this has absolutely nothing to do with the in-text ads, which I never saw and never bothered me :-)Anyway, I have to concur: If you didn't already, subscribe to LWN on the even if only on the starwing hacker level - it's great, you'll love it.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 12, 2007 21:31 UTC (Wed) by sveinrn (guest, #2827) [Link] I can tolerate lots of flashing and bouncing all around the article. There are only 2 things I don't tolerate. One is popup windows. The other is ads that interfere with the article.
So I really hope that you find an acceptable way of getting the required income to keep up the good work. And I will continue to subscribe even with lots of flash animations. And even if I, as a paying subscriber, get the option to turn off the banners, I will make sure they stay turned on to help you get a few more cents from my visits!
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 12, 2007 21:37 UTC (Wed) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link] Thanks for removing them again - such ads are very annoying!
I have never understood why more people don't subscribe to LWN considering
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 0:22 UTC (Thu) by larryr (guest, #4030) [Link] I have never understood why more people don't subscribe to LWN I have mentioned a few times over the last 3 years why I am not a subscriber any more: The reason I am not a subscriber any more is the site continues to not have what I consider to be minimum necessary features such as user profiles and comment moderation/filtering-- basic features of readily available software which could be used for LWN. If those features are ever present I will be happy to subscribe again. Part of the reason I subscribed was because I expected features such as those to be added once people were paying... several months later they were not, and did not appear to be coming anytime soon, so I stopped paying. Larry
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 2:26 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link] And to counter that view, here's mine: Please, NEVER add comment moderation! I'm paying for the editorial content, not the comments section, and I would regard trying to turn LWN into reddit as a waste of that money. Perhaps two switches could be added - "hide comments altogether", and "hide comments from non-subscribers" - but no more than that. I'm actually rather happy that LWN is a place Larry doesn't want to fund; it means it's a place I do, even though I really can't afford it at the moment.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 2:32 UTC (Thu) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] I agree; comment moderation/filtering is useless to me and I don't care if it's never added. Honestly, I can't think of more than a small handful of comments in the last 6 months that I didn't think were appropriate, so what's the point of moderation?
There is ONE thing I'd desperately like, though, that does require a user profile: a way to see only new comments since the last time I read them. This would add probably 80% of the infrastructure (and server resources) needed to implement full moderation, I realize, but it would be SO nice to be able to follow along with a heavily-commented article without searching through all the comments for the ones I haven't seen before.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 4:35 UTC (Thu) by larryr (guest, #4030) [Link] I can't think of more than a small handful of comments in the last 6 months that I didn't think were appropriate, so what's the point of moderation? The point of moderation is to give readers the opportunity to provide input about what they consider to be the relative amount of value provided by specific comments, so other readers can apply criteria to that input to filter from their view the comments they do not expect to find sufficiently valuable. Larry
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 8:15 UTC (Thu) by vapier (subscriber, #15768) [Link] ironically, if we had modding, i would have just downed your comments asmuch as possible into oblivion.
from my experience over the last year or so, few articles elicit enough
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 9:44 UTC (Thu) by gouyou (subscriber, #30290) [Link] I would say that 85 to 90% of the time, the comments are either high value or are part of a nice discussion.
What would be nice, is a way to have comments from developers of a project stand out (e.g. different header color + name of the project). The discussion on DTrace a couple of weeks ago would have benefited from something like this.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 12:24 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Tracking who's a developer of which project strikes me as an utternightmare.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 17, 2007 13:29 UTC (Mon) by gouyou (subscriber, #30290) [Link] Actually, as most of the people here are fairly well behaved, just a checkbox and a disclosure textbox would do, no real tracking just voluntary supplied information (e.g. for the DTrace discussion the guys concerned with the project would just check the box and add systemtap or dtrace as required.) Might not be used, but it could be nice ...
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 19:13 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link] Since LWN has no filtering, moderation is useless here. Even with filtering, which is useful and desirable in itself, moderation only tells you what everyone else thinks is valuable. Which is a great way of promoting groupthink and mod wars (cf. reddit) but not necessarily a good thing for quality of discourse - in fact, it becomes a very bad thing, for two reasons.
First, the groupthink issue. And secondly, because expressing disagreement becomes easy, reflexive and risk-free - which means, ironically, that the risk of saying something increases for the people who care about the group but decreases for trolls - it's a lot easier to wear a stupendously negative score as a badge of pride than it is a full, frank and funny dressing down from a respected elder of the group; but it becomes a lot harder to say something unpopular if one cares about the group dynamic and one's own reputation.
If you're desperate for LWN with moderation, I guess there's nothing (except possible copyright issues - Jon?) to stop you sourcing content from the free bits of LWN, reposting it on your own site, and adding all the moderation facilities you could wish for there. Of course it would be lots and lots of work, but that's no problem for you... right?
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 4:36 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] I also agree: I subscribe to lwn.net for the content. Whether or not comment moderation andprofiles are ever added is of no consequence.
As to the suggestion for showing new comments only, I use the RSS feed for this purpose already:
"No consequence." Posted Sep 13, 2007 12:22 UTC (Thu) by kena (subscriber, #2735) [Link] I dislike modding, but there are places where it's a virtual necessity. For example, news sites I visit that allow commenting on articles (nytimes.com and usatoday.com come to mind) have no modding whatsoever, and the signal:noise ratio over there is worse than Slashdot ever was. So I think it *is* of consequence... in the right place. Here, fortunately, I'm yet to see comments of that ilk. For this, I'm grateful. And, I suppose, as long as LWN keeps doing what it's doing, it'll attract readers of a sufficient-enough caliber that their comments will continue to be mostly signal.
Thank heavens.
In other words, folks: talk up LWN! Mention it on user group mailing lists, or other appropriate fora. I send out an e-mail every six months or so, pointing out what a wonderful resource it is -- because we, as humans, have a tendancy to take it for granted, but if LWN were to go away, there would be a huge void in the Linux community.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 6:49 UTC (Thu) by ttonino (subscriber, #4073) [Link] It should be possible to highlight 'seen' articles / comments just using javascript and cookies, based on the time of the last visit for that page.
That could even be done for the article headers. No information would need to be sent to the server, just post-processing the HTML based on timestamps in the markup.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 7:50 UTC (Thu) by petebull (guest, #7857) [Link] Yes, it would be great to have something like that.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 17, 2007 12:28 UTC (Mon) by jhs (guest, #12429) [Link] I wrote two Greasemonkey scripts which may help. One hides guest postings. The other displays only new comments since the last time you viewed the thread.
See http://www.proven-corporation.com/~jhs/lwn/ for more information. I will try to send a letter to the editor for the next weekly addition, too.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 17, 2007 17:11 UTC (Mon) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] This is so sweet! I don't know why you categorize the "hide already seen messages" as heretical on your website though. The "hide guest comments" maybe, but not "hide already seen messages".
I hate to be a pain but is there an easy way to change it so that guest comments are visible by default? I actually prefer to be able to read all the comments--I just want to read them only once!
Also, on your page's todo list, the "Expand All" / "Collapse All" buttons would be really nice to have.
Thanks, this is the bee's knees!
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 17, 2007 17:55 UTC (Mon) by jhs (guest, #12429) [Link] Thanks for the feedback. I still think the comment tracking is not quite there yet. The colors seem awful; I got them from a color scheme generator based on the "LWN orange." Also, I don't like how if you hit reload then you close out the entire thread. Maybe there should be a 10-minute delay, or a "mark all read" button instead of the instant behavior.
Hopefully my link will be in the letters to the editor on the next weekly. If I get some more feedback I will know what people want to do. Personally, I'd like to see highlighting of comments from "celebrities," and also the 3rd-party user home page database.
If you want to disable auto-hiding of guests, you can just edit the script from the Greasemonkey config. For muzzleLWNGuests, comment out the last executable line of code ("dispatchEvent"); for fancyLWNComments, change the conditional from "if(seen || guest)" to just "if(seen)". Hope that helps!
Hiding guest comments via Greasemonkey Posted Sep 13, 2007 9:25 UTC (Thu) by jhs (guest, #12429) [Link] I implemented this a while back as a greasemonkey script. It makes guest comments gray in color, with the message body hidden. Clicking a "View" button will expand it out so you can read the comment. The end result is that I could see all full subscriber comments, and only guest subjects.
I just went ahead and ported it to the non-table format and posted it on the web: http://www.proven-corporation.com/~jhs/lwn/. There are also screenshots of the older implementation, but it makes it easy to see what's going on.
Hiding guest comments via Greasemonkey Posted Sep 13, 2007 14:25 UTC (Thu) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link] This is excellent, Thank You! Jon, you may want to add a page pointing at this (if JHS doesn't mind).
JHS, have you considered updating it try and deal with "new" articles vs ones you've seen already? That's the one feature I miss the most (kerneltral.org has it, and I love it, although the S/N ratio there is rather low). I know a little JS and a little DOM - I may take a look.
Again, thanks JHS for the excellent script.
Hiding guest comments via Greasemonkey Posted Sep 13, 2007 15:18 UTC (Thu) by jhs (guest, #12429) [Link] Well, I emailed my original version to Jon, and he replied with a very enthusiastic silence. But although I made the script for myself and others, IMO, this site's strength comes from its spare and simple layout. It's a slippery slope to add features and reduce the conceptual integrity.
If enough people use the script, we could have it send a background GET for /i-want-this-feature.html to the LWN site. Then, every month, Jon can grep the logs for the 404s to get an idea of demand for this feature!
About new articles since the last visit, I guess there are two approaches, both of which I do not know enough about Greasemonkey to criticize. Firstly, maybe the HTTP headers (particularly, "If-modified-since" from the browser) are accessible, and they can indicate when the browser last accessed the URL. Then, it should be simple enough to eliminate or collapse the comments posted before that date. The other option is to use some permanent storage and record all comments seen (they already have unique IDs from the [Link] anchor). I seem to recall that Greasemonkey does provide some kind of file-based storage, but maybe I'm just dreaming.
Finally, I am not a Javascript expert, but I got pretty serviceable at it over a short time by using the MochiKit library, which has complete documentation and unit tests and borrows many Python-isms.
Hiding guest comments via Greasemonkey Posted Sep 17, 2007 12:30 UTC (Mon) by jhs (guest, #12429) [Link] I updated the Greasemonkey scripts. Now there are two versions. One hides guest postings as before. The other displays only new comments since the last time you viewed the thread.
See http://www.proven-corporation.com/~jhs/lwn/ for more information. I will try to send a letter to the editor for the next weekly addition, too.
Hiding guest comments via Greasemonkey Posted Sep 18, 2007 23:51 UTC (Tue) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link] JHS, You Rock!
Thanks!
Hiding guest comments via Greasemonkey Posted Sep 13, 2007 19:01 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link] Thanks, both for the script and because I think this is the first time I've ever found myself thinking "hmm, maybe it's time I installed Greasemonkey".
Hiding guest comments via Greasemonkey Posted Sep 17, 2007 12:26 UTC (Mon) by jhs (guest, #12429) [Link] I updated the script. Now there are two versions. One version hides guest postings as before. The other version displays only new comments since the last time you viewed the thread.
See http://www.proven-corporation.com/~jhs/lwn/ for more information. I will try to send a letter to the editor for the next weekly addition, too.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 4:52 UTC (Thu) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link] That seems downright silly. Weren't you subscribing to LWN for, oh, I don't know, the content?
I do agree that a basic profile of each user with an email address and a webpage would be good. I've seen a few posts where I would have liked to contact people off-site.
Agreed with the others re: no moderation. Restricting comments to subscribers-only might be an option in the future if comment spam becomes a problem, but fortunately so far it has not.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 16:02 UTC (Thu) by larryr (guest, #4030) [Link] Weren't you subscribing to LWN for, oh, I don't know, the content? If "the content" excludes the comments, then no, definitely not. Without the comments the site is essentially a newsletter or a blog with unmoderated comments, of which there are dozens or hundreds with worthwhile content available to me with no monetary cost. I was subscribing to promote efficacious support for community interaction, which I continue to find lacking, especially considering products like Slash have been readily and freely available for years with out of the box support for all I have asked for. Larry
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 18:30 UTC (Thu) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link] I'm sorry, but if you think slashdot is as good as LWN, then I guess ourdefinitions of high quality content differs quite a bit. The same counts for the comments - often the developers of the software mentioned comments on the article so the comments clearly adds a lot to this site.
I read other sites, but I haven't found any other sites that consistently
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 15, 2007 18:08 UTC (Sat) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link] ...and yet, all the sites that use Slash (etc) have less pleasant communities than LWN. Obviously there are other factors involved as well, and every site is different, but... if all the empirical data goes the other way, then why exactly *should* we believe it's a high priority feature?
(Which blogs do you read with non-comment content that is comparable to LWN's? This is a genuine question, I would like to read them...)
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 16, 2007 22:48 UTC (Sun) by larryr (guest, #4030) [Link] ...and yet, all the sites that use Slash (etc) have less pleasant communities than LWN. I think there is a subset of the Slashdot community which is at least as pleasant as LWN, and has a much larger cardinality, and I get to see just that subset because of the moderation and filtering criteria Slashdot has made available to me. Larry
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 6:50 UTC (Thu) by pointwood (guest, #2814) [Link] Sorry, as others have said, I pay for the high quality content, not for the great flashy design or loads of features.
I also don't see much use of the features you are missing - this is not Slashdot.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 16:15 UTC (Thu) by larryr (guest, #4030) [Link] this is not Slashdot. I agree, in the sense that for me, Slashdot provides at least an order of magnitude more value, because it has a community of people with a vast breadth and depth of knowledge and the ability and willingness to share their thoughts and opinions in an environment where they can expect what they say to be seen by people like me for whom it is valuable, because the site supports mechanisms for the members of the community to ensure other members have information available (moderation input) which they can use to limit the comments they see to only those they expect to be of the most value to them. Larry
Depth and breadth Posted Sep 14, 2007 17:25 UTC (Fri) by filker0 (guest, #31278) [Link] A lot of very knowlegable people read LWN regularly. I know that many Red Hat engineers read LWN quite often, and, though I won't name them, many of the "luminaries" of the free and open source and Linux communities are regular readers of the articles.
LWN is not intended to be an interactive BBS or forum. It does what it does very well, though there's room for improvement (and improvments have been, and are being, made). You seem to want something else from it, more like a moderated message board, but that's not what LWN is, nor is it what I believe it should be -- there are a lot of those out there.
I subscribe to (and read) LWN because of the editorial content and its focus on what I'm interested in.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 8:08 UTC (Thu) by filipjoelsson (subscriber, #2622) [Link] That would turn the comments section into the kind of popularity contest that slashdot is. We already have that there, and I for one, am happy to have a place with insightful commentary and without karma whoring at the same time.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 16:10 UTC (Thu) by snix (guest, #47375) [Link] I read the site almost everyday and would like to subscribe. But living in Germany there is no way for me to pay ( I won't create a Paypal account just for that )
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 20:44 UTC (Thu) by vblum (guest, #1151) [Link] Credit Card?
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 21:23 UTC (Thu) by Felix.Braun (subscriber, #3032) [Link] Even though credit cards are getting more wide spread over here as well, they are no where near as common as they are in other parts of the world. Quite a lot of people don't have them, because mostly you only need them when buying things from American companies.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 21:37 UTC (Thu) by vblum (guest, #1151) [Link] www.dkb.de . Neither do I work for them, now do I have an account with them. Not that LWN should be the reason for that, but if your German bank does not offer you a free credit card, you might not be getting the best deal around ... again, as stated above, neither do I
Anyway - my real point is, one cannot expect LWN to function by German bank transfer. Although, if you're serious about signing up, and this is your only obstacle - I'd be happy to sign you up if you'd transfer the money to me ...
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 14, 2007 19:03 UTC (Fri) by amazingblair (guest, #2789) [Link] Felix,
Could you write a check to LWN in American dollars? I live in the US, and so I don't know if that is possible for your German bank.
-Blair
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 15, 2007 15:58 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] Quite a lot of people don't have them, because mostly you only need them when buying things from American companies. I'm curious: when ordering something online from a non-American company, how does a German typically pay for it?
German bank transfer Posted Sep 16, 2007 18:59 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Bank transfer, which are very cheap and convenient over there. Germans also expect payments to be done by transfer too; it causes a lot of headaches on eBay.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 15, 2007 5:47 UTC (Sat) by nettings (subscriber, #429) [Link] fwiw, i've used paypal for three years, just to get the lwn subscription done (only this year i've gotten a credit card, finally).it has worked without hassles for me. i'm aware that there have been a number of privacy f&%$-ups and other silly things going on at paypal, but so far i've been lucky. given they have now obtained bank status (which implies an increased amount of public scrutiny), it should be a reasonably safe bet w/o too much pain.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 12, 2007 21:51 UTC (Wed) by MisterIO (guest, #36192) [Link] Maybe the most obvious thing to do to have more subscribers is to make articles become guest-viewable after more time(for example after 3 months!).
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 0:34 UTC (Thu) by i3839 (guest, #31386) [Link] Maybe, maybe not. A couple weeks at most, any longer and I wouldn't be an LWN reader and subscriber now.
re 1 week -> 3 months Posted Sep 13, 2007 10:38 UTC (Thu) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link] Frankly, I tend to forget/lose interest/read elsewhere most of afterweek stuff that I generally miss or would be interested in.
The "problem" here is most Ukrainian cards (including mine) being non-payable online, and me being way too lazy to go out and find what is -- for both actively avoiding non-cash payments and the process being doable but reportedly non-trivial (several friends of mine went through it).
So for me there would be just no difference in missing the article after a week or after a year. Don't know how much it could relate to other "stone guests".
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 12, 2007 21:53 UTC (Wed) by JoeF (subscriber, #4486) [Link] "a tad unpopular" must be the understatement of the year ;-)
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 12, 2007 22:01 UTC (Wed) by a9db0 (subscriber, #2181) [Link] Thank you Jon, for listening to your readers.
It's one of the (many) reasons I subscribe.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 12, 2007 22:05 UTC (Wed) by ms (subscriber, #41272) [Link] I find it odd that adverts are a realistic source of income on this sort of site at all. The best part of LWN is the words. The site works just as well in iceweasel as it does in lynx. Ads are only ever going to degrade the iceweasel experience rather than the lynx experience.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 0:01 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] The fundamental problem is that advertising is not well-matched to LWN, and never will be, in any form.
Maybe now you'll be willing to try, instead, hosting a mini-economy that trades in "LWN subscription weeks". Readers would contribute time from their own subscriptions to authors of particularly useful comments, and editors might promote particularly well-scoring comments to articles, or (anyway) to a page collecting "best comments". People with excess earned "weeks" could cash them in for coveted LWN tchotckes (obtainable no other way), or for raffle tickets offering chances to win more-expensive weekly and annual prizes.
Imagine the cachet of riding around a conference on your LWN-monogrammed Segway while talking on your LWN-monogrammed New 1973 phone, sipping from your LWN-monogrammed coffee cup, and wearing your "Jon's ottoman" t-shirt.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 0:13 UTC (Thu) by jordanb (guest, #45668) [Link] > Imagine the cachet of riding around a conference on your LWN-monogrammed> Segway while talking on your LWN-monogrammed New 1973 phone, sipping from > your LWN-monogrammed coffee cup, and wearing your "Jon's ottoman" t-shirt.
"Cachet" wouldn't be the word I would use..
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 0:41 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] Sorry, "nerdihood" isn't a word (yet).
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 0:38 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] Sorry, that's "Neo 1973".
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 2:29 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link] > Readers would contribute time from their own subscriptions to authors of particularly useful comments, and editors might promote particularly well-scoring comments to articles, or (anyway) to a page collecting "best comments".
Please, no scored comments! That way shark-leaping lies.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 2:53 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] The number of weeks donated to the author need not be visible to readers.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 9:58 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] People are not stupid; it is too easy to make people into comment-whores.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 21:21 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link] When expressing approval of a comment costs real money, people will express it more judiciously than on sites where it costs nothing.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 0:52 UTC (Thu) by malor (subscriber, #2973) [Link] I'm sure I speak for most of us when I say that we want very much for you to grow, prosper, and make a very comfortable wage doing LWN. This particular idea was a bad one, because it affected the integrity of your main product, words. But keep trying, there's gotta be something that works. You have great content here.
Banner ads are fine with this user, as long as they aren't animated. And Google text ads are okay too.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 1:28 UTC (Thu) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link] I tend to think the reason LWN continues to have financial problems is that the target reader pool is limited and relatively static: free software advocating IT professionals that prefer a small, simple and clean site rather than flashy design.
Changing the site to appeal to different readers would tend to alienate the original subscribers, meaning LWN is caught in a catch-22 situation. I don't see this changing any time soon, unfortunately.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 1:43 UTC (Thu) by musicon (subscriber, #4739) [Link] One really simple suggestion is for everyone to simply click on an ad once per week and spend a few minutes looking at the destination site. It doesn't sound like much, but it certainly would increase the ad income without affecting the remainder of the site.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 2:29 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link] I already spend quite enough time on Google, thank you. :P
Value of looking at ads Posted Sep 14, 2007 12:56 UTC (Fri) by pjm (subscriber, #2080) [Link] May I clarify and suggest that ultimately it's only buying products that are useful to you that makes the world better; that looking at ads without it leading to buying a product useful to you only costs you time without benefitting the advertizer. So increasing click-through numbers may increase payments to LWN (to the detriment of the companies supporting LWN) in the short term, but in the longer term it only reduces advertizers' perception of the value per click-through, and advertizing revenue goes down again.
So the clarification is that we shouldn't click on ads if we've no intention of buying, but rather that we should seriously consider if any of the products or companies advertized on LWN can offer us something we'd want to buy. This not only helps LWN into the longer term, but also helps the companies that support LWN, and helps ourselves in getting the product that was useful to us.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 3:54 UTC (Thu) by jimmybgood (guest, #26142) [Link] The little buggers really weren't all that bad. More to the point, though, they certainly didn't prompt me to click on them. Targeting random words taken out of all context is a broken concept. You may as well just serve up a random ad. Now, it does work with search keywords, but that's because they are obviously important to the subject.
Some sites are really clever about supplying ad links targeted to the subject of the article. Those I regularly click on.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 4:24 UTC (Thu) by jimparis (subscriber, #38647) [Link] As a guest, I would have been fine with just reading each issue one week late, for free. But I would have had to poll the webpage by hand to find out when that was available. My main reason for getting a subscription was just so that I would get an automatic e-mail each week. It's sometimes the little features that can make up someone's mind!
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 8:04 UTC (Thu) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] Huh? AFAIK. you can get a mail when it's released for guest readers.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 18, 2007 0:43 UTC (Tue) by jimparis (subscriber, #38647) [Link] if so, I'm glad I missed that :)
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 5:41 UTC (Thu) by csawtell (subscriber, #986) [Link] On comment pages please consider s/guest/freeloader/ and give us theoption of not viewing the result of their keystrokes.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 12:36 UTC (Thu) by sepreece (subscriber, #19270) [Link] I don't think you make progress by insulting people and I think that it's quite possible for non-paying readers to say things that are useful, interesting, or otherwise worth reading...
I concur Posted Sep 16, 2007 19:06 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Reading what is offered freely does not turn you into a freeloader. After all, none of us was born a subscriber; most of us presumably spent some time as guests, and had to pay our way into subscriberdom. (That excludes Red Hat employees, you lucky guys.)
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 6:41 UTC (Thu) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link] Thank you. Upgraded my subscription-level to project-leader as promised. I hope everyone else who promised similarily does too.
I am also pleased to note that my prediction; that Lwn is good at listening to its readers, held true.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 15:22 UTC (Thu) by stevem (subscriber, #1512) [Link] Good point.
I hadn't promised, but I've just upgraded my subscription anyway.
Thanks to Jon - it was nice to finally get to meet you in Cambridge last week.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 8:02 UTC (Thu) by IkeTo (subscriber, #2122) [Link] I'm still believing that the problem of LWN is that too few people know about LWN at all or why they would want to subscribe (perhaps this is no longer true, in that case you can stop reading here). If that is the case, perhaps it pays to display a notice at the beginning of every article during the 2nd week when a non-subscriber tries to access the content (telling something like "you could have read this one week earlier, and help us continue to write good articles as well!", with a link to subscribe, perhaps some prominent links to archives, etc, etc). Then try to get articles of the last week into places like Slashdot (after all they have become free content).
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 18, 2007 22:46 UTC (Tue) by BackSeat (subscriber, #1886) [Link] I'm still believing that the problem of LWN is that too few people know about LWN at allI've been interviewing people recently for a Linux consultancy role. One of the questions I've asked every interviewee is, "How do you keep up to date with what's happening in the Linux world?". Not one of them has included LWN in the reply. I agree: too few people know about LWN.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 13, 2007 10:42 UTC (Thu) by janpla (guest, #11093) [Link] I personally despise nearly all kinds of advertising, not because they are advertising, but because they are intrusive, which I feel is a sign of gross disrespect. This includes the 'noisy', animated adverts at the edge of articles.
There is one situation where I will look at adverts: when I have decided that I want to buy something; ie when the adverts are relevant to me. So how about finding a way to ensure that we only see adverts when it is relevant, which is the best situation for the vendors anyway, eg. by putting adverts in a seperate section with a link from LWN saying 'Adverts: Here' or whatever.
That section could be more elaborate, with articles about the products, search facilities etc.
paid links, again? Posted Sep 13, 2007 12:09 UTC (Thu) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link] Jon, local advertisers have approached me with proposal to host paid links on several of our sites (which were never demanding a cent, and we never got around to considering them a source of revenue; so "just for fun" and certainly incomparably lower grade). I can see that lwn.net/ and /Articles have PR of 8 and 7, maybe that could add something? If you're also too lazy/busy to investigate, I can mail that person to approach you -- ping shigorin@gmail then.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 16, 2007 22:35 UTC (Sun) by mendie (subscriber, #46973) [Link] Good to hear. Thank you.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 17, 2007 22:13 UTC (Mon) by sflintham (subscriber, #47422) [Link] A somewhat pointless comment, but FWIW I have now subscribed after reading LWN as a guest for (I really can't remember) a year or two and enjoying it a lot. While I resented the odd suggestion in the previous issues' comments that I was a parasite (someone offered me something for free and I took it; I didn't lie or cheat), the discussion reminded me that I'd often thought this was something worth paying for. And also FWIW, I never saw any of the text ads, I guess they were got rid of even for non-subscribers before I happened to read that issue as a guest.
LWN advertising update II Posted Sep 22, 2007 16:40 UTC (Sat) by da4089 (subscriber, #1195) [Link] I would be happy to pay a small premium to my subscription to have an ad-free site. I don't mind ifthat premium is significantly more than my page impressions would return ($5 a month?). I read LWN for the uniquely high signal-to-noise ratio (kudos to all staff and contributors).
The most challenging question, IMHO, is what to do for those who read the site without a
As always, I support the ongoing dialog between the creators and readers of LWN on this subject.
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