On the future of LWN

"Somewhere on its home page, (or anywhere but clearly visible), there can be a target amount, total amount collected so far and time remaining."

Those of us who are dedicated supporters of LWN (I made a non-trivial donation yesterday), need to be able to see what is needed and how much is actually achieved.

Perhaps LWN could go as far as having an Open Books policy, I don't know.

Let's keep the dialogue going and perhaps collectively, we can develop a viable solution to LWN sustainability.

Regards,
Mamading Ceesay

He's also working to turn k5 into a non-profit entity, which I imagine is a necessary component to make something like that work: a lot of people don't want to donate to a for-profit company.

He was able to raise 6 months worth of salary for one person. Your expenses are greater: 6 months salary is about 90,000. But if you could raise that in a once-off fundraising drive, you wouldn't have to worry about money again until after christmas.

I really like having both Kernel Traffic and the LWN kernel page, but I think more people could be involved if the standard weren't for one person to try to cover everything important that happens.

It has been suggested yesterday already, but I didn't see it mentioned as option:

Why not ask some of the global Linux players like IBM, RedHead, SuSE etc.

LWN is an important online source of information. Every company in the Linux market should appreceiate this.

They employ developers (some well known ones) working on various parts of Linux.
Why shouldn't they employ people doing a Linux online mag ? Or if employment is not a viable option, at least some bigger, regular donations might be possible.

Wouldn't some kind of fund be a good idea ? All the Linux companies paying into a fund, out of which Open Source related work - like LWN - is paid !?

Maybe somebody has just to ask them...

Anyway, whatever happens... thanks for 4+ years of interesting information and commentary. Good luck for your future.

With kind regards,
Harald Henkel

If you'll charge $6 per month (~$1.5 for a week) - a subsription base of 4000 people should make LWN alive..

Of course - if someone wants to subscribe for 6 month, or 12 months in advance - then price should go down a bit...

As for subscription billing - I suugest worldpay.co.uk - they have the infrastructure for a monthly charging credit cards - transgaming is using them and I didn't hear any complains from them. PayPal won't help much here unless for donation activities.

Hope this helps, I'll be glad to help with any planning needed.

Hetz Ben Hamo
hetz@witch.dyndns.org

• Thank you all very very much. I am very grateful for the good job you have done all this time.
• Every week, I read the front page, the kernel page, and the development page. I scan the security page but skip all of the vulnerability announcements and stuff (even though I am deeply interested in security and do security consulting for a living). I glance at the Debian section of the distributions page, but it never has anything that I haven't already seen. I don't even load the other pages.
• I read the daily updates, but I wish that I would not spend my time doing that and instead just wait for the weekly version.

P.S. Thanks again. I was really disappointed to hear that you were stopping this project. I hope you can find a way to keep it up.

Regards,

Zooko

There are a couple of alternatives to PayPal: e-gold, and Amazon.com's "honor system" thingie.

I would love to see an experiment with micropayments: "If you found this article to be valuable then please click here to donate 25 cents to the LWN.net team.

Regards,

Zooko

Another quality news site has gone through similar problems... Gamespot. Now, granted, Gamespot is part of CNet and therefore has a lot of capital. But they still have to make a profit. As of a few months ago, they have adopted a controversial yet innovative and intelligent subscription service, which you should consider.

Here is how it now works at Gamespot: by default, visitors have access to Gamespot Basic. That includes recent (up to a week old, I believe) articles and some media (a few screenshots per game, for example). The members-only Gamespot Complete adds access to all archives and more extensive, bandwidth-consuming media like movies.

So you get access to the site for free, but there are significant advantages to being a member. You can read all reviews if you follow the site closely and therefore decide whether or not you like their journalism. But if you decide now that you want to read their full review of Neverwinter nights, you'll have to become a member.

I believe that this is a balanced approach that LWN should consider. You could allow free access to all new content, even the editorials that appear over the week. That way those who follow you closely would still have access to everything. Then, after some time, it would be archived and become unvailable to non-members.

I would go one step further. Since your weekly content now appears in the daily updates, the weekly edition is more of a convenience than a necessity for your readers. I would make the weekly edition a members-only area. This alone would make membership very appealing to all who have been reading you for the last few years.

You could also have special offers for corporate clients. Many people in the Linux business have to read your publication on a weekly basis because their boss wants everyone to be up-to-date. You could offer corporation-wide memberships. You might even manage to sell such a subscription to some libraries.

And note that you can do this and still collect donations from time to time. You could even put an option on the registration page that says "Add a $25/$50/$75 donation to this transaction." You can still sell ads. You can still do whatever you need to do to get necessary funding.

Thanks, and good luck.

PS: I wish to thank you for all the work you have done over the years. Your publication was excellent by any measure, and definitely the best in the GNU/Linux scene. I hope you can keep it up and wish you the best of luck should it prove impossible.

So at a bare minimum of $20,000/mo, that's 4,000 subscribers at $5/mo.

If there were a "corporate" level subscription, for businesses, you could double or triple the subscription rate and allow access for an entire business entity.

Perhaps a mailing list delivery option of the weekly edition and or daily articles could be a subscriber value add?

The current funding status could be viewable at all times.

Best of luck,

- cameron

I, too, would be interested in a subscription; I like the idea of keeping the basic weekly news free but giving more to subscribers.

Someone has already mentioned printable PDF as a subscriber benefit, another would be the "whole thing on one page" format that I have always preferred. You could go even further and give subscribers a personal, configurable portal page.

Yet another subscriber benefit might be a personal "home page" -- a picture, HTML in the bio, cross-reference to comments, maybe even a weblog. That way, a subscriber community could develop. (Of course, something like that would also eat up a lot more of your readers' time, but...)

But it seems to me that HPaQ, IBM, and Google ought to be on the firing line on this front, and also ought to have the capital laying around...

Get a grip people. We live in a capitalist society. Figure out a way to make ends meet, don't cry about it. If you're too dumb to be able to capitalize on this ezine to the tune of 15k/month then you're too dumb to be telling the linux community anything.

The problem here is an astounding lack of effort. Instead of making grand proclamations like a pregnant woman without food, why don't you quietly implement some revenue streams..

Then the revenue will be streeaaaaming in and the rest of us don't have to hear or see this shlapp.

I swear, it's almost as bad as hearing some of these dorks whine about LinuxToday. What are you, 13?

Did it ever occur to anyone that you could make a membership with added benefits while not keeping any of the current features from the rest of us? Then all these bleeding heart wannabe communists could pay til their hearts content!

But I don't want closed parts of the site. While now I could afford such a thing, that didn't happened before, when I was in college. That was the time when I participated more, either by suggesting news or commenting on the news (I even got a few e-mails on the "Letters" section). I believe this feedback is extremely important for LWN and improves its quality. This is why I consider putting behind doors part of the site a bad thing for LWN.

In any case, it will be your choice. Keep us informed ;).

Thanks for all of your efforts.

Tom Keiser

I'd have no problem with $5/month. Heck I could probably be talked into $5/week so long as the wife doesn't find out :-)

This is a valuable Linux resource. LWN gives a voice to the open source community. Rational voices speak here. Concise summaries and lucid commentary are always found at LWN. It would be a great loss if all that went away.

-Mike

to this end, like others, i'd be willing to pay - up to $US60 per year.
being an invalid this sum represents 50% of my weekly income but i'd consider it money well spent.

good luck to you all at lwn and many thanks for hanging in there this year.
peter

I'm subscribed to 2 "normal" computer magazines, so if subscription is going to be the way, I would subscribe as well for LWN. The magazines cost me the equivalent of about 80 USD / year each (with added services, CD-ROM), so I would accept about the same price. I would prefer half-yearly / yearly subscription, maybe with rebate compared to a weekly subscription.

Please look into these possiblities carefully, I would _really_ miss those Thursday nights reading the weekly edition. You provided great information for years, kind of "c't" e-magazine for Linux...

The editorial content of LWN is the best of it, and I think you should focus on this. If running a web site is too expensive, perhaps shrinking your ambitions and offering subscription for a newsletter by email may be a cheaper alternative?

Make a subscription to a printed version available for ~ 30-60 (depending on weekly or monthly) dollars a year, and I will send a check right now.

As far as the expenses of printing are concerned, I suggest you do something different than all the other magazines out there.

Print on newsprint. This will save on printing costs, as well as reinforce the quality of the editorial content. I believe this will bring in a lot more advertisers as well. Plus newspaper printing technology is optimized for speed as opposed to quality, which will allow for the paper to be weekly

LWN will become the newspaper of the Linux - Free Software - Open Source movement.

Think About it.

1. your publishing costs are nil. (formatting is another matter, but you said the server is free).

2. your production costs are absolutely minimal.

3. This is a tiny magazine.

4. you don't have to market in a way that traditional magazines do.

5. all of your employees can telecommute

6. Linux is a blossoming sector of the IT industry, and this publications follows open source in general!

7. Being a popular magazine, you should be more than able to rally an ample supply of volunteer or part time writers.

We don't need a bunch of lazy fat cats whining about the mag. If you can't manage things, give it to me and I'll make a ton of money with it, redesign the site in the process, and increase readership.. Nooooo problem.

Everyone is an armchair entrepreneur, it seems. I'm not about to miss out on all the fun, so here are my thoughts:

• A subscription service is a must. Most people are happy to donate, but too lazy to do it regularly enough. Perks for subscribers are necessary if LWN is to get enough subscriptions to be profitable in the long run.
• This cannot rely on added services in the short run. The LWN staff is nearly burned out already. A few months of reasonable income are required before we can expect them to expand their service offerings. So please people, stop with the PDF and newsprint stuff.
• At this moment many people would subscribe out of good will and a desire to keep the site going. Combined with donations in the short term this might give LWN enough time to build up subscriptions.
• Fund raising works best when it's a game. Many people have suggested (or re-suggested) a dynamic display meter that indicates the amount of money LWN has and needs to keep going for the next few months. This is an excellent idea for the short run.
• LWN is part of the free software community. They cannot maintain credibility if they permanently fence off "content" in some way. Delayed access to weekly columns like Kernel for non-subscribers is reasonable, however.
• Delaying the weekly editorial risks making LWN less relevant, I think. The benefit that comes from provoking responses from important community figures is worth the cost of giving away that section.
• Some have suggested delaying news instead. I'm conflicted on that because news isn't what makes LWN unique. While the selection of news is unusually good here, it can be had elsewhere. On the other hand, I don't see how exposing the news to non-subscribers will encourage them to subscribe, unlike the editorial page.
• An idea I've not seen floated is allowing only paid subscribers to post comments. I expect that to be controvertial, but I think it's quite reasonable. People who have paid are those who care about this site and the community it represents. They will have the most interesting things to say.
• A less radical alternative is to identify comments from subscribers with a star (or some other distinctive mark). Perhaps this could even be optional so that subscribers could avoid distinguishing themselves in this way if that suits them.

So there you have it: my plan to save LWN. Implement a subscriber system that doesn't compromise the core values of the free software community and focus on collecting enough in donations to survive long enough to make it profitable. Work smarter not harder. Buy low sell high. And so on.

I hope that helps. Whether or not it does, allow me to add my voice to the chorus that chants, "thank you for all of the hard work and insightful commentary over the years."

You have a perfect opportunity to try it LWN! Recent donations give you
another month of life. Announce the policy now and see what happens. I
predict you will get many thousands of takers. I promise to be one of them.

The problems of LWN (free journalism) are the same as those of free music, free publishing, free software and etc.. They may be better and more efficient than their commercial counterparts, but we (humanity in general) simply must find a way to increase the demand ($) side of the equation if we are to continue to reap their benfits and efficiencies. The internet infrastructure has provided a jumpstart, but it is simply not enough to allow them to thrive longterm.

It breaks my heart to write this, but my advise is to continue with your plans to end LWN unless donations increase about 5x. The staff of LWN has my absolute best wishes. LWN is/was wonderful.

Bryce Kimmel

You guy simply to the very best job of reporting Linux news on the web.

Cheers,
Rich

Any kind of collection of money can be labelled as "regressive" or "progressive", though these terms are usually applied only to taxes. The more a tax takes into consideration the economic situation of a person's the more it is progressive. Thus the infamous poll tax is the most regressive of all, purchase tax is less regressive and income tax is the most progressive tax, as the lower clases pay practically nothing while the higher classes could pay (e.g. around here) up to 55%.

Donations sound progressive - sure, why not? Everybody pays what they can. The rich will fork our serious dough, those who cannot pay will get the service for free. Right? Wrong. In practice, especially for small donations such as those that might be collected for LWN, the issue of "can't afford to pay" is meaningless. Collecting donations is a kind of "tax on good-heartedness". Good-heartedness is not restricted to the upper classes - if at all it goes the other way around. Do you really think all the guys who just claimed they donated 100$ to keep LWN running are corporate managers? Give me a break.

So, to sum it all up, make LWN subscription based, all of it (possibly except the archives). You deserve to get payed. Your good readers should not subsidize all the blood-suckers (such as myself).

And did I mention you can cound me in?

Gady

If LWN registers as a charity (a defined public educational purpose is sufficient and appropriate), funding this, and other open-source/free-software community sector charitable organisations using accounted pledges of goods and services becomes possible. In this event I pledge $150 worth of my services, e.g. Perl or Python programming or correspondence courses see here for further information to the first person who gives this $150 in plain old fashioned cash to LWN in exchange for this pledge, requesting my goods and services and showing me a receipt signed by LWN's published GPG key.

I can donate in this manner more easily if I have a few hours spare time than if, like most LWN readers, I am short of old-fashioned cash. LWN gets the cash it needs if anyone takes me up on this. The person who does will have access to half a day's worth of my programming, project consultancy or tutorial skills at the normal rate.

Of course as a one off this probably isn't very practical and doesn't help that much. But there are thousands of similar financial problems and opportunities out there within the community, which simply depend upon having an adequate means of keeping score . Providing a networked means of keeping score in a manner which can support this and dozens of other community projects, and in a way that can also provide myriad employment and exchange opportunities within the community, can hardly be outside the technical or organisational capacity of this community.

This leads to a rhetorical question: If the banks can create money out of nothing more than our obligation to repay when we borrow it from them, why should a community awash with creative ability and talent and advantages in being able to exchange these be unable to get on a train with spare seats because of a shortage of tickets ? Could you imagine a builder being unable to create a building because of a shortage of inches, metres or kilogrammes ? For those interested in the technical development of software architecture that supports the organisation of open networked forms of money please join the mrsdev list: subscribe mrsdev

to majordomo@copsewood.net

Richard Kay rich@copsewood.net

Simple numbers:

10000 unique readers perusing the site. At a $50/year subscription, this is 500000$/year, or about $45k/month.

More than 100000 unique readers per month, segregate between users with accounts who are paying, and those who are using the services gratis. The paying customers get the full articles. Why? Well it costs you money/time/effort/resources to create and aggregate your content. Provide some free information, charge for others.

Sure, this is anathema to some in the OSS world. But the OSS world seems singularly unable to generate a working business model, and people engaged in this work need to eat, feed their families, house them, cloth them, etc. Working business models would require some sort of segregation of services, some sort of stratification.

I for one enjoy the summaries of the lists I simply do not have time to read. It helps me with my own development efforts. And frankly, $50/year would be a bargin for the quality of information that this yields.

Note: Similar models are at work at http://www.tgc.com (HPCWire), http://genomeweb.com (BioInform, Proteo-monitor), and others. These models do work, and people are gainfully employed as a result (I subscribe to HPCWire, and it costs far more than the $50/year).

I am reluctant to donate, as I dont know what I am getting for my money. I am quite open to subscribing, as I can put a finger on the value, and I can justify it as a business expense.

I've been a reader of LWN for as long as I've been using linux (followed the link from linuxhq before it moved to kernelnotes), and I've only missed out on you during vacations, and when my kids were born. The content you have been producing has been very good IMnsHO.

I would like a PDF version for subscribers for the simple reason that then I could DL to my PDA and read it when I have a spare moment. (Such a thing should be easy to automate - shouldn't it?) Anyway, I agree with the chorus that say "implement subscription". I can't wait to pay you, so I didn't.

As to what to charge for, I think it's reasonable to charge for the weekly edition. Just keep the editorial and the newsfeed open. (The editorial promotes the internal newspages. The newsfeed provides a conveniece for the community.) You should probably only have the forum open for subscribers - that would be a way to keep the troll issue at arms length.

Yours sincerely,
Filip.

PS A curious inquiry - would you mind updating us on the donation front?

PPS I once hade a professor who only opened mail containing the word "beer" in the subject... ;)

Regards,

Tom

I think subscriptions/donations to LWN can be the same. An (optional) little annotation on comments such as this as was suggested above would satisfy me. Perhaps little penguins, the more you donate (cumulative) the more penguins you get. Perhaps something else.

A prominent ad should remind readers that LWN is supported by user donations, and suggest that readers who find the content useful should consider contributing, not freeload. (The public TV and radio are pretty good at this.)

In any case, I too would like to thank all of the LWN staff for the absolutely superb job they've being doing. If LWN goes away, I too will have a void in my life every Thursday. Best wishes for the future, whatever that may be.

Bradley

The key points of the following suggestion is that it needs to be clear to subscribers where their money will go --in particular what happens to the money after the needs of the lwn staff have been met. I suspect that if lwn has a clearly stated and attractive plan for what to do with extra money they will have far greater success in getting the minimum necessary. Now, without further ado, I humbly submit a rather vague and preliminary suggestion for a revised business model.

Make the cashflow provided by readers, i.e. donations and subscriptions, transparent. A bar graph for each month would probably be sufficient as long as it is clear what the minimum required per month is to produce the "standard" version of lwn where you are paid at livable rates. Clearly, subscriptions would be spead out over the period of the subscription while donations could be counted immediately.

Publish a plan of things lwn would like to do that are conditional on the availability of extra money. My idea would be special features written by freelance contributors. Let anyone making a donation vote on topics (as opposed to specific articles) that are of interest to them and let subscribers vote with a certain portion of their subscription. (The more subscribers you have the larger this portion available for voting should be).

Let subscribers and those making donations have access to these special features at defined points in the editorial process. The readers who are interested in a topic may have interesting questions, comments, suggestions and insights that would really help ensure high quality content. Of course it would take a lot of work to set a system like this up and a lot of thought to make the social aspects of it function correctly but I think it is achievable (especially if you let the readers help with suggestions).

I would think that having special features with a longer lead time than "the weekly news" should provide considerable help in increasing advertising revenue. I would hope that in the future the advertising revenue would be enough to make up the difference between livable wages and market rate wages for the lwn staff. If the lwn staff does a really fantastic job then hopefully they could get enough advertising revenue to get above market wages (which in my opinion they richly deserve :-).

In summary all "published" content would be available to anyone. Participation in discussions would still require people to register. People making donations and subscribers would have access during the editorial process to special features (as opposed to the current lwn stuff) and would have greater influence on the kinds of special content that is published. Ideally lwn should keep track of the contributions made by readers (through frequency and a rating system maybe?) in the form of discussion and comments and provide some way for highly esteemed readers who are not subscribers to be awarded similar priviledges to subscribers in compensation for their contributions.

* Words to make it claimable to:
1) line manager/expence people
2) tax man/accountants
Things like 'subscription', etc
* Offer to send an invoice/reciept once funds have been claimed from the credit card (does not need to be paper, a PDF would be OK)
* Offer to send a reminder once a year/quarter/... - you don't want to go through this hell again in a year do you ?
* What sum will get through corporate expences without question ? I would suggest the cost of a tank of petrol (£32 for my car in the UK ~= $50).

Get the idea -- I am sure that you/readers could come up with other suggestions.

I'm willing to donate, if donaters gain nothing extra from it! Contrary to all the me-tooers saying 'you earn it', I don't care about that at all.

I wont give in to extortion. Making stuff (with negligible reproduction cost) and distributing it only if the receivers behave in certain manner is just that. I would stand my ground and not act against my interest. But solidarity is something I would well do.

Consider non-profit organization.... that might appeal to a wider audience (as far as donations go)... and you could have companies/sponsors 'match' donations during these quarterly shing digs...

g'luck!!!

As someone who has donated a small amount of money on a couple of occasions to you to help you continue, I'd like to put forward a suggestion:

Consider a donation funded operation similar to public radio or public TV. 1500 pledges of $10/mo would fund a years operations for you. According to your donation acknowledgement page as of 1 month ago, you had nearly 500 donors, so you are nearly 1/3 of the way there.

I stand ready to make such a pledge as soon as you get the mechanism in place.

Your loyal reader,

When your subscription lapses -- you see it again. You don't have to subscribe, but if you want to, at least you won't forget to. If you dont intend to subscribe ever, you can turn images off.

Of course, the banner would be in addition to current advertising banners.

Just ideas,

M.

I agree $12k isn't going to last you long, and if you have to threaten to close every month to get this money it'll be a little ridiculous.

We know the subscription model works on the internet (one famous NY paper has proved that) but people must value the information - and it appears your readers do.

Can I suggest a payment model that my industry is looking at for electronic info delivery - prepaid micropayments. A payment of a few cents is made per viewed page from a small prepaid account. This account could be just a few dollars but, at say 5 or 10 cents per page this would allow access to a few issues before topping up is necessary.

Stephen

Nonags.com is another great site that offers something for nothing and a subscription model. They don't have the overhead of publishing but higher subscription prices should cover that.

I'd subscribe and not expect anything more. You do a great job.

Phil

As a potential subscriber I'm not so much interested in some "community web" or stuff like that. I want the money to go to the LWN staff so that you can focus completely on the quality of the written content.

Now I do hope that 50 dollar is a resonable subscription rate; I'm a student and if the yearly subscription goes very much above that level I'm not sure I can afford the subscription I so dearly want to support the LWN staff with.

A way to solve this would be to go for multiple subscription levels, Ie corporate, 100 - 200 dollar, normal grunt 50, and student or unemployed maybe 30.

Just a suggestion, not meant to sound cheap. I really do look forward to read about the solution to the LWN financial problems.

Regards, Fredrik Jonson

Just as an aside, the current slashdot situation is weird--I actually find a lot of the /. ads **interesting** and I don't wish to pay to remove them at this time!!! That could change if they take on advertisers such as X10.
-Terry

It is one of the few sites I actually consistently go to and read every week.

I too would subscribe if LWN went subscription based.
I would not object to value-added feature for subscribers, but would not be for subtracting current content for non-subscribers.

I think it is important for readership to remain at a high level.
I believe advertising will recover at some point in the future.
I have no problem and in fact encourage a combination of subscription/sponsorship/advertising for revenues.

I would be in favor of voluntary subscription/sponsorship being heavily promoted. Create various levels of sponsorship/subscribers. Have an understanding of how may subscribers/sponsors at the minimum level would keep LWN running. Keeping us informed of number of subscribers/sponsors. I personally don't believe we have to know exactly what your financial position is beyond any understanding of funding need. We don't need to know if and how much you surpass the minimums. We should not feel bad or poorly if you become blessed beyond the minimums. Nor should our willingness to help subside, because after all you have enough. It would be nice even, if you could put back into full time service those who have been cut do to economics. Or add to those are part time but would like to be full time. Expand the vision of LWN and be blessed.

I am for finding funding for the people who are producing LWN now. Not in finding ways of cutting costs and people. The people behind LWN deserve to make an honest salary. We all who have been regular readers have benefitted from their time and effort. The laborer is worthy of his hire.

I hope you are able to continue publishing for a long time.

Thanks for the priviledge of commenting.

* Thank you for everything.
* I'm willing to pay a subscription $2-$5 a month.

Yours,

Eyal Zvi,
Israel.