Help wanted [LWN.net]

Help wanted

Posted Jul 13, 2009 14:58 UTC (Mon) by shmget (subscriber, #58347)
Parent article: Help wanted

Our venerated editor said: "LWN's business model is a bit of an anomaly; there are few sites, anywhere, which get by primarily on subscriptions from their readers."

LWN is also the only Linux-oriented News website that provide that level of quality articles. Very, very rarely, after reading a LWN's article, do I feel I wasted my time.
It would be sad that with such quality product, you'd have to resort to Ads.

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What an ad sales rep needs

Posted Jul 13, 2009 17:28 UTC (Mon) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

I hope Jon has received some nibbles from this.

The problem is that you don't sell ads based on the content, no matter how good it is. Media buyers don't understand the content. You sell the audience to the advertisers, so the rep needs to be able to send the media buyer the results of a reader survey. (Yes, all those questions like "What is your role in purchasing NAS devices?" and "How many employees does your company have?")

So, if a survey comes up for LWN or some other site you like, fill it out. (Unless you live in your parents' basement and dumpster-dive for computers--then install SurveyBlock Extreme Pro now.)

Help wanted

Posted Jul 14, 2009 9:31 UTC (Tue) by jcm (subscriber, #18262) [Link]

Advertising isn't wrong, bad ads are "wrong". Honestly, I'd rather LWN continued to be a great news source with a few carefully chosen ads and the crew could afford to invest some more - scale up a bit, take a team building weekend trip to a small island somewhere, etc. - than have to live with what must be a tough time economically at the moment.

Besides, I'd probably read the ads if they were reasonably appropriate to me. Twitter and word of mouth are great, but sometimes even the most connected of us discover a good thing through an ad on a website, even if we choose not to admit to it.