Late thoughts

Late thoughts

I am not interested in micropayments, and in fact would not subscribe if you even imply you will keep my credit card number beyond the time needed to charge it for the subscription. I doubt I am the only paranoid person around.

I would buy a t-shirt, but you would have to ship it to me, and I would probably only be interested if you offered them when I wanted to resubscribe - now a year away again.

I think ideas like forwarding a link are good. You may get the word of mouth gains. Equally, asking LUGs if they would agree to contact their members on your behalf is interesting. Perhaps some LUG members can suggest if there is an acceptable exchange, such as hosting contact details or even just web addresses for interested LUGs.

From my point of view, you have to become visible to more people. 3k people is nothing compared to the linux user base. I also subscribe to a paper magazine. I do not imagine that this would function with so few subscribers, and wonder if there is a cross advertising deal which you could do. I tend to read news on-line, but prefer the magazine for articles on how to do stuff, like deal with encrypted data systems or set up a WLAN. I think there is little enough overlap that a deal might work. Maybe even some of the Grumpy Editor articles could make it to print, citing LWN.

Or else just take out a page advert in a linux (or computing) publication, giving free access for a month with a code from that magazine. You could even put "this is a free trial", or "your free trial expires in XX days" notices on the page.

I hope you suceed in keeping LWN alive. Please be sure to share your thoughts going forward in the next issue.