Increasing the lockout period

Increasing the lockout period

I think before considering a longer lockout period you should reflect very carefully on what you are trying to achieve. If your targets are increasing revenue and improving financial sustainability (as opposed to the perhaps more emotionally satisfying goal of punishing us freeloaders) I seriously doubt longer lockouts are going to help and they might well hurt LWN's chances of long term survival.

Most people who haven't subscribed by now probably don't find LWN valuable enough or don't possess suitable credit cards (in my case it's the former, I like reading LWN's kernel articles now and then and, while they're great, I don't feel they justify the hassle of subscribing). How many of these people can you force to subscribe by reducing the value of the free edition? I suspect it would be quite a small percentage.

Non-subscribers at least know of LWN's existence and like it enough to visit occasionally. That makes us, I think, the best hope of selling more subscriptions in the future. We might change our minds about subscribing, get more Linux-related jobs or, at least, spread word about LWN to others who might become readers.

Now, my suggestion to help finance LWN is giving the possibility of reading the free edition without any lockout by riddling it with ads as much as you like. That would solve the problem of not being able to send links to the content and would increase readership, hopefully without hurting subscriptions.