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Is it really The End? Do a survey first!Is it really The End? Do a survey first!Posted Aug 1, 2002 1:24 UTC (Thu) by lonely_bear (subscriber, #2726)Parent article: Is it really The End? A survey is needed. You need to do a survey for how many is willing to subscribe, rather than gussing the number on your own. You will never know until you do the research. I, for one, am willing to pay for the subscription.
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Is it really The End? Do a survey first! Posted Aug 1, 2002 3:09 UTC (Thu) by virtex (subscriber, #3019) [Link] Looking at the donations "thank you" page (http://php.lwn.net/corp/supporters.php3), there are 775 people who have donated. I'm not sure how many of these make up the $25,000 amount quoted in the article, but if we assume they all do, that works out to an average donation of about $32 each. If all these donators buy a subscription, they would each have to pay an annual price of about $232 to make up the required $180,000 per year. In order to drop this down to, say $50/year, we would need about 5 times as many subscribers as donators. Given that the average donation was $32, there may be some people not able or willing to pay that much, but with some additional money coming in from advertising and sponsorship, they may be able to drop the price a bit further.I don't think obtaining that many subscriptions is at all unrealistic. I will definitely subscribe when it becomes available.
Is it really The End? Posted Aug 1, 2002 4:54 UTC (Thu) by mefistofeles (guest, #3022) [Link] The success of the subscription plan I think depends on the subscription goodies. Obvious, isn't it? You wrote that you would delay the access to the weekly edition for non-subscribers. Not enough if simply by comparing with myself. I'm not always able to read it on Thursdays and that doesn't matter at all.You must come up with something really entising. I would recommend staying off the dead-tree version for a long time. I'd feel that it would cost much more than you would earn on it. A PDF-version is neat though ... Just my two Eurocents, /M.
Is it really The End? Posted Aug 1, 2002 6:50 UTC (Thu) by claes (guest, #2873) [Link] I agree completely. Probably the weekly edition should only be available to subscribers. I know I would rather wait until Monday to read the free one. Not because I am cheap, more because of laziness and convenience.Don't feel bad if you restrict content although you propagate for free software. You are doing free software a service by writing about it.
Is it really The End? Posted Aug 1, 2002 8:04 UTC (Thu) by micro (guest, #3026) [Link] As much as I hate to say it I agree as well. If you want to remain in business I suggest you make LWN subscription only.After you you still have Linux Daily News people can read for free. My concern would be that in trying to be free you could effectively compeletely disappear from the scene. It would be a shame to lose both when just losing one would suffice.
Is it really The End? Posted Aug 1, 2002 9:48 UTC (Thu) by Mithrandir (subscriber, #3031) [Link] Well, I disagree entirely. I hit the site about 3 times a day, and I'd never be able to wait as long as till Monday.. it'd be completely out of date wrt the pertinent events. I value the editorial opinion of the LWN crew.Even if I could wait, I think I'd still subscribe, because I beleive that nothing comes for free and I don't want the valuable contribution that LWN.net makes to the linux community to disappear. I'd like to have the subscription model include the option to pay for a year or so in advance, or to have the amounts debited from my credit card monthly, so I wouldn't have to worry about fiddling with the payments each month.
Is it really The End? Posted Aug 1, 2002 15:52 UTC (Thu) by anamana (subscriber, #2787) [Link] I agree with Mithrandir. I've donated last week and I would still bewilling to pony up a subscription price for the forthcoming content. A good SciFi author (Heinlein) gave us the acronym TANSTAAFL - There The LWN content is far and away the best I've seen on the net. If we
Is it really The End? Posted Aug 1, 2002 17:02 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] But there is such a thing as a free lunch, and most readers of LWN are using it: the Linux kernel, the GNU utilities, X, the Gnome and KDE stuff, etc (yes, most of the people doing this work have some arrangement that lets them get paid, but you, the reader of this message, are almost certainly not paying. Given that LWN covers free software, it would be hypocritical to make LWN completely subscription-only: the material would be gathered mainly by interviewing people who give away their work for free, after all. However, the plan to delay access to non-subscribers for some time period is completely reasonable and I fully support it. This is very different from denying access to the LWN weekly edition to non-subscribers forever.
Is it really The End? Posted Aug 2, 2002 8:55 UTC (Fri) by micro (guest, #3026) [Link] True, it may be perceived to be hypocritical, but I don't believe that in actual fact it would be, but maybe that's just me.Remember the FSF is about freedom not price. I don't see how people's freedom is limited by asking people to pay for such a service. As you rightly point out the material is (thankfully) already freely available to poeple if they want to search for it, indeed much of it would still be neatly presented on lwn.net in the daily news section. The service that we would be paying for is for someone to collate it and present it to us in such a way that it saves us time and is of interest. People have a right to earn a living and make money. Indeed the GPL expressly allows people to make money out of free software, so long as they don't restrict the freedom of others in the process. If LWN contained important documentation that was not available elsewhere I'd be more inclined to agree with you, but as it is, it's more like a newspaper reporting than anything else and I see nothing wrong with a subscription based system.
Is it really The End? Posted Aug 3, 2002 16:45 UTC (Sat) by shakti (subscriber, #3101) [Link] Make the weekly edition subscriber-only for the first week. Then, when you're publishing a new edition, make the old version public to everyone.
Is it really The End? Do a survey first! Posted Aug 1, 2002 19:44 UTC (Thu) by robert1cole (guest, #3061) [Link] I'm going to play the bad guy here for a min.My home page is linuxtoday.com I get most of my info news wise from there and the links take me to places to read it that are free. Sometimes I get directed to LWN.net. Sometimes not. Although this site is pretty well put together and all I wonder about the value of a subscription based system. There are just so many sources of news and such out there that I can never keep up with them all! I read news and stay on top of the linux world as part of running my business. Some days I spend 4 or 5 hours reading news and I STILL don't get it all. To be honest I would probably be more likely to subscribe to linuxtoday if they went subscription based simply because they seem like a clearing house of information linking me all over the world. That's value to me because I want to know what M$ is doing and the rest of the linux world too. I cancelled all of my paper magazine subscriptions a long time ago because the news is always out of date and I was hardly ever taking the time to read them anyway. They would sit for months then hit the trash. Please don't flame me here this is just my opinion and views. I'm thinking that maybe everyone at LWN needs to just go out and get another job and do LWN on their spare time. Yes this will cause a decrease in content but maybe the focus of LWN could change to just reviews on hardware, software, extremely detailed howto's (very much needed I think and GENERIC ones too, not just Redhat, Suse, etc) on extremely popular topics like iptables, firewalls, detailed medusa9 or snort installation reviews, howto's. etc. That type of focus is not so time critial and once the ball was rolling there would be new stuff pretty much every week. AND that would be something I would pay for. And LWN writers would be able to have their outside LWN job and have a little money from subscriptions to pay basic expenses like ISP/hosting costs, have a party now and again and post the pics of the fun and photocopying of butts while drunk :), etc, etc. I guess what I'm saying is to become a source of detailed info on common and not so common howto's. And I do mean DETAILED. There isn't a clearing house of good info like this anywhere. The howto sites (tlpd, etc) just don't have what I'm talking about here. How about an example. I could contribute this one even... I looked and looked and googled and googled and couldn't find good info on chroot jailing named. I wanted to setup named in a highly restrictive chroot jail environment. Before you tell me all the places I can get that info let me assure you I went to all of them and many different places looking for a concise and CLEAR way to do this. Well I ended up using about 3 different sources and a bit of my own know how and a week or so later I had it done. In the end it was a rather simple process but because the howto's were so spacific to THEIR distro it made things EXTREMELY difficult because the howto's simply didn't work or apply. I've found this problem with just about every howto out there. There are exceptions of course but many/most are just not very useful if at all. A focus on things like Medusa9, Snort, Freeswan, iptables/firewall's, various email apps, Linux as a desktop and all the goodies. Bringing all these sorts of things under one site would be a boon to many. The most useful sources of how to set things up has been thru articles, not howto's. Linuxplanet is a good example of a place I go for how to get things going. I'm like many people I learn best by seeing something work first then go backwards in learning the extreme ins and outs. I'm not been very successful reading the manual/man page and getting a complex program to work the way I wanted it to. I learn by examples/sample configs, etc. Anyway I've been long winded enough... These are just my thoughts... Robert
Subscription payment methods Posted Aug 2, 2002 5:53 UTC (Fri) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link] You're not the only one willing to pay for LWN. I'll gladly subscribe given the chance. I live in Australia, however - so payment options can be tricky.This is one of the big problems with reader-pays site models - arranging convenient, inexpensive (ie low fee / overhead) international payments. Something to be aware of - not all your readers are in the USA or even Europe.
two suggestions Posted Aug 2, 2002 12:41 UTC (Fri) by slimy (guest, #2695) [Link] my two thoughts: - take credit-card details and all information to process subscription but don't process any unless you get enough to float for the years worth of subscription. - you still need to encourage new subscribers: after the weekly news has been viewed by subscribers publish one or two of the most popular articles as teasers to encourage others to join. the kernel development article is in my opinion the best of lwn, it is a wonderful contribution to the linux community. best wishes lwn xxx
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