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SubscriptionSubscriptionPosted Jul 28, 2002 13:41 UTC (Sun) by landman (subscriber, #2901)Parent article: On the future of LWN Check your logs. How many independent visitors read/use this site? Simple numbers: 10000 unique readers perusing the site. At a $50/year subscription, this is 500000$/year, or about $45k/month. More than 100000 unique readers per month, segregate between users with accounts who are paying, and those who are using the services gratis. The paying customers get the full articles. Why? Well it costs you money/time/effort/resources to create and aggregate your content. Provide some free information, charge for others. Sure, this is anathema to some in the OSS world. But the OSS world seems singularly unable to generate a working business model, and people engaged in this work need to eat, feed their families, house them, cloth them, etc. Working business models would require some sort of segregation of services, some sort of stratification. I for one enjoy the summaries of the lists I simply do not have time to read. It helps me with my own development efforts. And frankly, $50/year would be a bargin for the quality of information that this yields. Note: Similar models are at work at http://www.tgc.com (HPCWire), http://genomeweb.com (BioInform, Proteo-monitor), and others. These models do work, and people are gainfully employed as a result (I subscribe to HPCWire, and it costs far more than the $50/year). I am reluctant to donate, as I dont know what I am getting for my money. I am quite open to subscribing, as I can put a finger on the value, and I can justify it as a business expense.
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Subscription Posted Jul 30, 2002 0:07 UTC (Tue) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link] This is, perhaps, the best appraisal I've yet seen in this thread (which, amusingly enough, is the largest thread I've yet seen on an LWN article -- assuming you add up both posting counts).I concur entirely with Landman, and I've got my $50 sitting here waiting. Like him, I just want to know that I'm not throwing it down a well. I'll happily buy the drinks for everyone (on staff :-) at the farewell party --that's not quite my point. If I'm going to toss money on the kitty, I just want to know for sure it's going to stay alive to eat it. I suspect there's quite a bit more money floating around out here behind the same wall. And please, don't take offense to my outlook if you've already *put* your money where your mouth is; we wouldn't even be having this conversation if not for y'all. Cheers,
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