Selling yourself cheap [LWN.net]

Selling yourself cheap

Posted Sep 29, 2005 15:59 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
Parent article: An LWN status update

To be honest.. I consider LWN membership to be my most important 'community' item. I havent signed up for any of the other groups (ACM, IEEE,etc) because they just do not give me the value that LWN has given me. I have dropped pretty much my other reading sites because they are simply too much crap to what little signal is there. I also use LWN to go over what other information is more interesting for me indepth. I used to use Slashdot and stuff for that but the noise levels and the level of junk they post is not worth me spending time there or even paying for it.

Personally I would like to be able to pay $20.00 a month as that would be still less than one organization wanted from me. I think that the lower end should go up at least by inflation.

If its possible.. I would stagger the free versus pay articles. I wouldnt mind paying for someone to go over the various programmer blogs and point out which articles are important to me. These are usually time sensitive and locking them for a week means that paying for it is important. The weekly items are very important and could go for 2 weeks.

To get a larger audience.. you need to advertise via what people read mostly these days.. blogs. People who pay for this need a vanity item that they can show off.

to post comments

ADVERTISE!

Posted Oct 7, 2005 2:53 UTC (Fri) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

Searching for the word "advertise" on this page (full of comments) found
*two* instances and one was the link for advertisers *on* LWN. While
word of mouth and Google are reasonable enough ways for LWN to find its
way to new readers, surely you must have considered paid advertisements
in other media?

You won't increase subscriber numbers (much) without increasing
readership, and there's only so much you can increase subscriber prices
by without turning away new subscribers. You need new readers more than
anything -- and they won't subscribe until they've learned to appreciate
the value of the site.

Ads aren't cheap but they do generate traffic; put them in the trade
press. Places people who weren't in the first wave of Linux adopters
read regularly: Wired, ZDnet, The Register, etc. You provide them with
enough referrals, ask for some back!