LWN: Comments on "A quick LWN update"

A quick LWN update

rrude — Fri, 08 Apr 2005 15:20:52 +0000

There is really very little difference between subscriber vs. guest
(particularly for lurkers), but further delaying access might not
convince many more people to subscribe. Perhaps lwn.net needs to nag
non-subscribers a bit more even when viewing older content? Many people
are just lazy and need a push.

Is there any way you can sell LDD through this site? I would rather have
purchased it directly from you rather than from Chapters. This assumes
you would earn a larger profit.

This site is a tremendous resource for developers. Hopefully all of the
distributors and high-profile shops purchase subscriptions for their
staff. I wonder if OSDL (for example) would be interested in covering
some of your operating expenses (hosting, bandwidth, servers, etc.) in
exchange for a 'sponsored by' on the front page. Are there any OSDL
folks reading this?

Anything that allows you to keep writing, Jonathon!

Payment options

niner — Thu, 07 Apr 2005 17:44:58 +0000

I really like lwn and it became one of three news sites I read regularily. However I'm still no subscriber, but would be for a long time now if there was just one more payment option: an ordinary bank transfer to a European account. This way the transfer would cost nothing and lwn would get 100% of the money I spend.
Credit cards are not an option since I just don't have one and normally also don't need one. Paypal is also not an option for me personally.

Delay non-subscription content for 1 month -- NO, NO, NO

daveho — Thu, 07 Apr 2005 13:13:14 +0000

I'd also like to weigh in to advocate against a 1 month delay. The 1 week delay allowed me to fully evaluate whether or not it was worth spending $5/month for full access. (As it turns out, it was :-) I don't think I would have bothered looking at articles from a month ago.

I like the fact that there is now a cheaper subscription rate available. $60/year is substantial amount of money for a lot of people.

Expanding LWN

filipjoelsson — Tue, 05 Apr 2005 11:12:42 +0000

I disagree. Corbet, Brockmeier, Bodnar, Sobol, Cook, and the occasional article by PJ provide a mix of writing and editing that gives that extra value. Granted, if there was this website with only Corbet's writing - I'd have it bookmarked and go there regularly; but I'm not sure I'd be ready to pay as much for it. The mix of LWN provides a balance.

I've seen suggestions elsewhere in the comments about covering desktop programming a bit more - in addition to the excellent kernel programming coverage. I think that may be a good way to go. Interesting as the kernel coverage is, I have a feeling that a much higher percentage of the readers are a bit more casual programmers than that. Diving into desktop programming gives a result that is instantly visible, which generates a good feeling. Looking forward to the next part of a serial of that sort is exactly the thing that would hook me on subscription - had I not already hooked, so to speak. :)

Delay non-subscription content for 1 month

EricBackus — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 20:09:48 +0000

I think delaying non-subscribers longer is a bad idea. I suspect that you'd decrease the total number of readers without increasing the number of subscribers significantly. Maybe you could delay an additional day or two, but no more.

A different idea I saw in another comment was to have a higher-tier subscription level of $15-20 per month. I'm not sure how many takers you'd get (I have to admit, I won't be doing it), but adding this level is probably very easy so I think you should add it.

Another idea I saw in another comment, which I think might be good, is to give out @lwn.net email addresses for a price (maybe the new "benefactor" subscription level could provide this).

A quick LWN update

lutchann — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 05:40:59 +0000

Yeah, LWN is worth more than $10/month in my opinion. You'll probably find that a number of people are willing to pay more than that, particularly when the subscription is on their company credit card.

A quick LWN update

egoforth — Sun, 03 Apr 2005 04:31:39 +0000

How about another tier of individual subscriber? I can certainly afford to support the site at more than the 'project leader' level, and I presume that I am not alone in that regard. Possibly a 'benefactor' level for US$15-20 per month?

If you feel the need to offer more premium features, I'd be happy with an "@lwn.net" e-mail address.

Expanding LWN

corbet — Sat, 02 Apr 2005 21:52:14 +0000

"It'd would be valuable if subscribers could post anonymously. I would prefer not to have my name and credit card number tied back to this post. Sadly, I do, because there are no other options."

Just FYI, we do not retain any credit card numbers, and thus cannot associate numbers with specific posts. Even the automatic monthly subscriptions are handled through the credit card gateway, so we don't need to keep the number around. We like it that way.

"It'd be nice to actively know how much revenue LWN makes, how many subscriptions it has, and so on."

We gave the subscription numbers in the article. As for the rest, I don't know that we need to tell the world exactly what we're making - we have the same privacy concerns you just expressed, after all. I will say that your back-of-the-envelope numbers were not all that far off.

Expanding LWN

pm101 — Sat, 02 Apr 2005 20:59:15 +0000

So I don't know about others, but the only content I really read is written by Mr. Corbet. Some of the guest authors are pretty good as well, but overall, the unique property of LWN is the quality of Mr. Corbet's writing. As a result, I'm perfectly happy paying Mr. Corbet. I would be less happy paying a staff of 20 less competent people to make a giant publication too large for me to read (those exist, and I don't read them). So I fundamentally think that LWN would be better off scaling back the publication (less work, no new costs, and potentially scaling back existing costs) than it would be trying to grow (increase both revenues and costs). I also think that a smaller LWN would be more robust to economic fluctuations.

I also think that, fundamentally, openness is a big part of what free software is about. I don't think a tightly closed publication with month-long waiting periods would serve the community well. I often point friends to LWN articles. This is both valuable to me, but it also brings in new people. A one-week delay is a minor annoyance, but a two-week or a one-month delay would be a show stopper. I would even consider experimenting with an even softer policy -- only provide the index page to subscribes, but allow non-subscribers to view actual articles. If someone sets up a deep-links-to-lwn-articles.net, take it down. If it's used only occasionally, to point a friend into an article, keep it.

It'd would be valuable if subscribers could post anonymously. I would prefer not to have my name and credit card number tied back to this post. Sadly, I do, because there are no other options.

It would also be nice if LWN had open books. I think Mr. Corbet deserves a good salary (anywhere between $50-$100k is certainly reasonable). Right now, I can at estimate that LWN makes 4000*60=$240,000. We add another 10% for advertising, and the total comes to $264,000. The staff is composed of 3 people. This would come to $88,000 revenue per person. Assuming 50% overhead, that comes to $44,000 income per person, which is right on the lower margin of what the editors ought to be paid, which is what the article claims. It'd be nice to actively know how much revenue LWN makes, how many subscriptions it has, and so on. Part of this is that people would be more likely to spend $$$, but part of it is purely philosophical. This is the free software movement. It is about openness.

A quick LWN update

minty — Sat, 02 Apr 2005 15:48:22 +0000

The content at LWN is superb for technical types who have the pleasure of doing this for a living.

When I broached the subject of ubscriptions for my project team to management, they looked at what was available for free and decided that the one week delay really wasn't a problem. Hence no purchase.

Personally, I think they missed the point (and hence I and a couple others on the project team now have personal subscriptions), but the fact is, until some of the article content (excellent summaries/insights) are restricted in some way you may be limiting opportunities for 'corporate' orders.

Some suggestions:

1) Provide extended abstracts/references to all. Keep (some/all) extended content to subscribers.
Perhaps only restrict this to certain technical articles?
Perhaps make certain sections freely available one week in four or something similar (ie a nuisance factor and copyright-wise, corporates would be forced to pay for continuous access for their staff)

2)Make it easier for project managers to 'sell' this to management. e.g. 'A five-user annual license' (or a per project annual license - with project size defined) to LWN has a more comfortable ring to it than anything with the word subscription in it. (Our organisation just turns round and says we DON'T buy subscriptions, go to the company library and ask them.)

3) Perhaps some more articles geared to introductory concepts or to userspace programming to get the best out of the kernel may extend your userbase. You could then keep introductory articles and technical commentaries free, more advanced specific indepth articles for subscribers?

e.g. Some (topics)
Coverage of kernel latencies etc is fine, but the implication on audio/media/other app writers is the other end of the same problem. I've learned a tremendous amount from Lee Revell/Ingo's interchanges on LKML over the last six months. Maybe ask Lee to co-author an article on some of his experiences.
I've learned a lot about the need (and difficulties of profiling user and kernel code). Not sure where this is covered very well.

I guess I'm suggesting that LWN could grow to fill the hole that application programmers find when they move over to Linux as well as those that focus on kernel development.

I actually don't think that changing the one week delay to two or more weeks would be useful. It is LWN's shop window.It hooks people to come back.

I compare my LWN subscription with having to buy the 'latest' kernel books every 6 months.

I've paid because of my moral obligation to reward you for access to the excellent kernel articles etc. Unfortunately, many others will see they are available for free anyway and not do so.

Above all I want this to succeed.

A quick LWN update

njhurst — Sat, 02 Apr 2005 10:58:28 +0000

Yes, I was going to suggest the mag move too :) New Zealand is a great place to live, has wonderful bandwidth, a progressive and innovative government, and has complete LotR sets recreated out in the wild!

Sadly, I live in Australia...

Delay non-subscription content for 1 month

Tobu — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 20:01:52 +0000

I wouldn't...
I've been attracted to LWN after lurking a bit, following the week-old news for a while, seeing the next headlines looking really interesting, but I certainly wouldn't have done that if all I had got was even two-week old material.
I do note that in-depth articles are not that time-bound, but the net is full of good pages and I think you need both freshness and content to get non-subscribers-yet to check-in regularly.

I'm not being very constructive here, so here is a small idea:
releasing the weekly edition on thursday and then the week-old edition on friday could increase the nagging factor for RSS-junkies like me, because they first would get an alert and then would get the meat, but not on the same day.

A quick LWN update

Tobu — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 19:23:55 +0000

This site is an example of well done self-moderation. It's quite large (stats), but comments stay relevant. It has a few particularities:

comments can be rated with links labeled «relevant» or «irrelevant»
through the use of css+javascript, comments are just hidden not moved to a separate page - so moderation doesn't get in the way if you don't want it to. Also, rating a comment doesn't reload the page either.

There are other goodies, like the highlighting of posts you haven't seen yet. Mass-rating is prevented by a daily limit (about 10). You are forced to preview your comment, which LWN already does.

Anyway - I don't see myself that the quality of LWN comments is low, even if they are growing quite numerous. So I don't think a rating system is necessary.

In the case of LWN, maybe some browsing convenience to collapse threads or highlight new comments would be a better idea in terms of coping with the numbers, however.

A quick LWN update

danieldk — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 19:20:42 +0000

As some others said, one month would be far to much in Internet time. The reason I took a subscription is that LWN has high quality in-depth coverage of new developments. I think that I would have subscribed earlier with a lag of two weeks, because waiting one week is not that painful ;).

In the end I decided to take a subscription anyway, because I felt that I had been leaching for far to long. It was only at that point that I actually checked the subscription options and saw that there was a subscription level that is affordable for students. If I knew that earlier, I'd probably have bought a subscription earlier on.

I don't pretend that I have a clue about marketing, but I would:

* lag a bit longer before opening up the weekly edition
* make the subscription prices a bit more prominent

A quick LWN update

pointwood — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 18:50:54 +0000

Thanks for providing these updates, it's good to know it's going in the right direction :)

I'm not sure changing the limit from 1 to 2 weeks would change anything, but I'm no expert :p Since I'm a subscriper, you're free to change the length to whatever you like ;) You could also try to get user to subscribe by giving a little more of the content away than just the headline, a little teaser. That might convince a some people to subscribe.

I do have some other suggestions though. As others have written - what about some banners that we could put on our websites, I don't have a site that gets tons of hits, but I wouldn't mind adding a little banner or something like that to my site anyway - everything counts :)

Another thing you could do is making the subscription option more visible.

What about selling merchandise? I know it's most likely not going to be a goldmine, but again, every little bit counts.

A quick LWN update

sjn — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 13:08:55 +0000

How about arranging a recruit-a-friend campaign?

E.g. if I convince a friend of mine to subscribe to lwn.net at "professional hacker" or "project leader" level, I get a one-year free subscription (and maybe a month for every "starving hacker" subscription). Likewise, two years free subscription for two friends, etc.

And to make it a bit easier to "sell" LWN, you can allow an option to let new subscribers (who explicitly tell who recruited them) get 50% off, at which you get half the benefits (e.g. 6 months free subscription) per subscriber.

I'm sure we can easily double the number of subscribers this way.... (at least for the first year. If lots of them stay after that: Profit! :)

Delay non-subscription content for 1 month

KaiRo — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 12:37:11 +0000

Even one week ole news are almost always old news in internet time, esp. as there are other news sites around where people stumble over some of that content as well (not as compact and well-sorted but...)

I don't think a longer period doesn't make more subscribers. Spreading the word about how good the content is, and marketing the site help more IMO...

A quick LWN update

thoeme — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 07:16:55 +0000

Hi all,

I don't know about the acceptable standards for comments, but compared to
some of the other news site I regularily read, the comment section of LWN
is quite on a high level. As a bad example - for reader with german
language knowledge - one can look at the comments posted to news at
www.heise.de (c't, iX computer magazines)

regards,
thoeme

Delay non-subscription content for 1 month

khim — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 06:50:49 +0000

I think this is bad idea to discuss this question where non-subscibers can not comment :). They can have valid ideas about question: you are trying to push them to subscription, not send them away after all!

May be this article should be public instead ?

A quick LWN update

piman — Fri, 01 Apr 2005 06:12:32 +0000

"Moderation", in its usual form, is absolutely useless. A good idea might be guest comments are "screened" until a subscriber vouches for them (either directly, or by replying to the comment). This avoids the complicated (hard to implement, hard to compute, easy to break, socially destructive) mathematics of moderation a la Slashdot or K5. It's amazingly simple, a lot easier for people to do, and won't interrupt conversations nearly as much.

Delay non-subscription content for 1 month -- NO, NO, NO

grouch — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 21:30:47 +0000

I like the 1 week distinction. It is one of the things that encouraged me to subscribe. If you keep news away from non-subscribers for 1 month, it has become non-news and of little interest to them. The goal is to encourage readers to get the news while it's hot off the press, not encourage them to go elsewhere because the only thing they can get here is old, dusty information. Teasers should be timely.

There are sites that are bass-ackwards; they allow anyone to read the latest but charge for access to old archives. As much as I despise most actions and policies of the MPAA, the movie industry gets it right: Newest == most costly while cost goes down with age. Linuxgazette.net (_not_ dot com) provides considerable material that is not time-sensitive, so old and new articles have similar value. LWN, on the other hand, provides very timely information and delaying access for too long will discourage new readers from ever coming to it in the first place.

BTW, I've kept a little ad/comment about LWN at the bottom of the only page on my personal site that gets any traffic - http://edge-op.org/grouch/schools.html
I would be willing to put some kind of banner on other pages if LWN provides permission and a reasonable banner.

A quick LWN update

daniel — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 19:48:45 +0000

"LWN content remains of high quality, but the quality of the comments has plummeted. I'm considering making a new policy for myself of not clicking on lwn.net comments, since they are more and more irritating and time wasting."

I would like to see a moderation system, where you have to be a subscriber to moderate.

A quick LWN update

lovelace — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 18:01:56 +0000

Congratulations for surviving! But instead of asking for indulgence, why don't you ask for what you really need, which is for some of your 4,000 avid readers to go out there and help drum up business for you? It's the least we could do, considering what an essential resource you've created.

I'd certainly put up a LWN banner on my website.

Delay non-subscription content for 1 month

a9db0 — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 17:35:20 +0000

Two weeks would work. Four weeks is an eternety in internet time, and would likely encourage the non-subscribers who browse through occasionally to look elsewhere as LWN would appear to be be out of date. Two weeks is short enough to be relevant, long enough to be irritating - it might encourage a few more readers to get off the pot and write a check.

Meanwhile, keep auto-renewing my subscription.

Delay non-subscription content for at least 2 weeks

jva — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 16:25:48 +0000

I'd advocate delaying non-subscriber access for at least two weeks. If someone wants the
information sooner, they can subscribe. LWN needs to offer more incentives to those who
subscribe, and make "free-loading" (sorry if that sounds negative) less attractive.

Delay non-subscription content for 1 month

rgoates — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 15:45:08 +0000

How about a two week delay? One month might be better than one week, but it sounds pretty long in internet time.

Delay non-subscription content for 1 month

corbet — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 14:50:07 +0000

Increasing the subscription period is something we have to consider from time to time. I'm curious to hear what people think about that idea...please post your thoughts!

A quick LWN update

zooko — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 12:53:50 +0000

LWN content remains of high quality, but the quality of the comments has plummeted. I'm considering making a new policy for myself of not clicking on lwn.net comments, since they are more and more irritating and time wasting.

I don't know what, if anything you can do about that.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Zooko

A quick LWN update

alspnost — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 10:19:09 +0000

Guys, move to Europe! That'll solve your health insurance woes, and you'll get better beer too ;-)

But seriously, it's good to read that you've met your original subscriber targets, and as always, you must be commended for sticking through the hard times and continuing to produce quality content of genuine value.

Delay non-subscription content for 1 month

rwmj — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 09:02:15 +0000

1 week isn't enough to provide a distinctive
difference between subs and non-subs ...

Rich.

Needed resources

eludias — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 08:21:51 +0000

Subscribers! Subscribers! Subscribers! (...as Steve Ballmer would say)

A quick LWN update

daniel — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 08:04:38 +0000

...a more focused sales effort. Making all this happen with the current staff will be a bit of a reach; we'll get there, but we ask your indulgence if LWN shows occasional signs of stress in the mean time.

Hi Jon,

Congratulations for surviving! But instead of asking for indulgence, why don't you ask for what you really need, which is for some of your 4,000 avid readers to go out there and help drum up business for you? It's the least we could do, considering what an essential resource you've created.

Regards,

Daniel