Slashdot [LWN.net]

Slashdot

Posted Sep 29, 2005 3:34 UTC (Thu) by stefie10 (guest, #19478)
Parent article: An LWN status update

I think you should try to get slashdotted regularly. Maybe you could make LWN free three months out of the year, and hope that lots of articles get slashdotted in that time. Or maybe when you have a particularly good/interesting article, you make it available for free and submit it to slashdot. (Even coordinate with Rob Malda.) If you got slashdotted once a month, you'd have a stream of new readers who might potentially turn into subscribers once they see a lot of tantilizing headlines that they can't read yet.

I also agree that link forwarding would help. I have at least one friend who I think would subscribe. Convincing him to subscribe would be much easier if I could forward him cool links occasionally, rather than trying to tell him verbally about LWN.

to post comments

Slashdot

Posted Sep 29, 2005 7:34 UTC (Thu) by komarek (guest, #7295) [Link] (8 responses)

Coordinating with Rob was something on my mind, too. Maybe allow slashdot subscribers to travel from slashdot links to *certain* lwn content, when relevant. Because those people are slashdot subscribers, I would guess they are more likely to be willing to subscribe to lwn than a random sample.

I started reading The Reg because of slashdot, and I probably started reading LWN for the same reason. I rarely read slashdot anymore, but I pay at the "project leader" level for LWN (even when I'm too busy to read it for many weeks in a row).

One idea that hitchhikes on other commentors' ideas: When I want to send a subscription-only link to a friend, I may be willing to pay for the privilege. This would be something like a gift subscription.

Example:

I find an article I want to forward.
I click on "sponsor article to email address"
I enter email addr, and consent to micropayment by clicking "send"
A special link to the article appears in friend's mailbox
When friend clicks that link, my "account" is charged the micropayment

Notes:

* In order to keep credit card processing fees down, LWN could aggregate micropayments for some period. Or I could buy credits in advance, like those obnoxious college campus dining cards.

* The micropayment amount could change, according to age of article, length of article, or Jon's estimation of how much work went into the article. Multiple rates could be allowed, using radio buttons, with the default radio button set according to your subscription level.

* Sending a special link seems better than sending the article text, since it will draw the reader to the site. The email might also include

- the title of the article
- maybe first paragraph (or other auto-summary)
- optional guilt-statement (from sender): "This link broght to you by the generosity of X, who paid for you to read this subscription-only article"

-- Note: on the last idea, we should be careful not to make the recipient feel guilty and choose not to read the article.

* I'd prefer to be charged only for links that were "used", that is, the recipient successfully loads the linked page. Sometimes a friend might not have time to read the article, and there are many other reasons, too (let's not get into gift-card situations).

Well, I'm hoping Jon Corbet is still reading these threads, because I personally want the feature I've just described. For some friends, I'd probably spend more money this way during a year, than I would if I bought them a gift subscription.

-Paul Komarek

Slashdot

Posted Sep 29, 2005 8:31 UTC (Thu) by unaiur (guest, #3563) [Link] (1 responses)

I think that can be a great idea to put a button in the subscriber-only articles that sends an email with a one-time link to that article. When that link is used, it should be invalidated to prevent link redistribution. It should be free, since both lwn and the subscriber are benefited.

Yes

Posted Sep 29, 2005 9:57 UTC (Thu) by ikm (guest, #493) [Link]

I second this. This would do no harm, but would help attracting new people, smartly chosen by the existing subscribers.

Don't charge when a link is read

Posted Sep 29, 2005 9:16 UTC (Thu) by felixfix (subscriber, #242) [Link] (2 responses)

You might send it to a friend and expect to pay once, but when if the friend doesn't realize the cost and forwards the link, or someone down the line puts it on a web site. That could get mighty expensive!

Don't charge when a link is read

Posted Sep 29, 2005 9:55 UTC (Thu) by Quazatron (guest, #4368) [Link]

I think it would be a good idea if the link was 'read-once'. That way you could be charged for it and your friend would be the only one to see it. After he reads the article, the link becomes invalid and you are charged some small amount.

Don't charge when a link is read

Posted Sep 29, 2005 10:36 UTC (Thu) by dion (guest, #2764) [Link]

Well, the obvious fix is to make each link limited to something like 5 different users.

So if I forward a link to a friend of mine and then he can use that link in his own browser all he wants (set a 2 week cookie) and he can forward it to 4 other people if he wants.

The pages that they get served should state something like: "This page is is subscriber only content, but dion gave you free access, if it's any good please consider buying your own subscribtion"

Number 6 who gets the mail should get a friendly message that the content is subscriber-only, but they can get a fresh link directly from me.

Paying for the links could be as easy as subtracting a day from my subscribtion (that seems fair enough to me).

Put a forwardable link on all linkable items that I can just copy+paste into my own IM/email client.

Paying

Posted Sep 29, 2005 10:09 UTC (Thu) by ikm (guest, #493) [Link] (1 responses)

Paul, I think it is pointless to force subscribers pay for this. The real goal is to attract new subscribers, not to have profits from the forwarded links. The only thing that should be thought out is how many one-time links one subscriber may produce. For instance, two links each week, or eight links each month, or so. The criterion is not to allow one subscriber to forward all weekly content at once, each and every week :)

Stepping back a moment

Posted Sep 30, 2005 3:50 UTC (Fri) by pm101 (guest, #3011) [Link]

Okay. Lets step back a moment. If I really wanted to cheat, I could spread my username and password far and wide. Indeed, I seem to recall that at one point, there was a subscribed "cypherpunks" login that did just that. Let us assume Mr. Corbet, rather than announcing the cypherpunks login on the front page, decided to ban all people who logged in more than a dozen times in a week. At that point, I could grab an entire issue of LWN with wget, and forward it by e-mail. Worse, I could stick it on a pirate web site, or even Kazaa. Mr. Corbet could then embed watermarks and infiltrate pirate networks to figure out who was cheating. I, in response, could subscribe from multiple accounts so that I could try to remove the watermarks... To make a long story short, if people really want to cheat, they will. Right now, I think most of the readership wants to help out Corbet. Indeed, many of us donated before subscriptions, and are now subscribing. I don't believe cheating will be a significant problem.

The problem LWN has, and this is pretty fundamental, is illustrated in this graph:

[Insert picture showing exponential growth
of Linux userbase, superimposed with plot
of flat LWN readership base]

If those two lines tracked, Mr. Corbet would be well on his way to buying a small yacht. Sadly, they do not, since there is no convenient way for new readers to find out about LWN (as in, find out about the superbly high level of articles posted on a regular basis, rather than the mere existence of Yet Another Linux Site). While it may be possible to milk some additional money out of the current readership, that amount is pretty minimal. To be truly sustainable, LWN needs to find some way to draw in the additional readership from members who joined the Linux community in the past 3 years, as well as those who will join in the future.

I don't know the best strategy for this. A big part of it is to let people who are not members of the LWN community view some content. Sharing links is part of this. Another idea is a free trial subscription (on the facist end, this can be done by verifying credit card number; middle ground would be verifying non-free e-mail address; hippy end would consist of verifying any e-mail address, and having cheaters need to go through the hassle of getting a new e-mail address every few weeks).

Again, I do not know the best strategy. If I were Mr. Corbet, however, I would try opening up the site a lot. I'd probably go for the extreme -- links to articles can be viewed by anyone, and only the main pages are locked (so people cannot find the articles without subscribing or having someone forward a link). People can get a free 2 week subscription by verifying their (potentially free, potentially only non-free) e-mail address, but people cannot use the same e-mail address more than once a year. I would then monitor:

The level of abuse. Referrers could point out patterns of cheaters in links being accumulated on some web page. Free subscribers using 26 different Yahoo e-mail addresses could be tracked with cookies.
Growth vs. shrinkage of the number of subscriptions.

If the experiment fails, so be it. If it succeeds, Mr. Corbet gets his yacht (or more likely, a decent level of income).

(On a sidenote: I think the free subscriptions idea people suggested below is brilliant -- give out a free 3 month subscription to new FSF/EFF/LUG/Slashdot subscribers/etc. under what was listed as the drug dealer model...)

Slashdot

Posted Sep 29, 2005 15:58 UTC (Thu) by komarek (guest, #7295) [Link]

I was thinking of a one-time link, but we all seem to agree it should be limited somehow. If money were solicited at forward time, and there was a scale, then there would be little different between $1 for 5 "reads" and $0.20 per "read" (except convenience, and a transitive property). A limited number of "free" forwards sounds like it would earn some good will.

I suppose you could also add a number of forwards to each subscription level. Just because someone is at the lowest level does *not* mean that they don't know people who would also pay.

In balance, I think I'd suggest something like:

* 6 free forwards per year for any subscriber (one every other month)
* extra subscription feature to add more forwards

- If you add forwards at renewel/subscription time, you pay a flat rate (subscriber is speculating, transaction fees are minimized, encourage excess!)

- If you add forwards at other times, make the minimum payment sufficiently high that you make money despite transacation fees. Perhaps set different minimums for different transaction types.

And as so many others suggest, do *not* lower the price of the existing subscription levels, and do *not* make extra forwards free! My reasoning is that everyone might pay for extra forwards, regardless of subscription level. Maybe the subscriber could choose each time whether to use a "free" forward or a "paid" forward.