Oh look. LJ's at it again.

In the interest of doing the community thing and spreading the word - it is no longer possible to create a new Basic (free and ad-free) account on Livejournal. Existing Basic accounts remain ad-free, existing Plus accounts can be degraded to ad-free Basic.

I can't say I haven't been expecting this. LJ remained one of the very, very few places online that offered something both free and ad-free.

I've been around for more than a decade, and I remember when this happened to webspace. I migrated from Geocities (free to banner to popup) to Fortunecities (free to gigantic banner) to the space I was getting with my ISP (limited) to paying for my own domain and has it really been six years? It's a natural progression of the online evolution: at first it's free. Then it's ads. Then you realise that if you don't like ads and you use a service frequently, paying for it is quite an attractive option.

I use LJ daily as my main source of internet-community news and my main path of communication with many dear friends. Out of the clones, it's the most stable and the one with the most attractive array of options and layouts. I've had a paid account for years now, and each year I reconsider signing up for one more year, just like I reconsider the value-for-money of any other subscription. (I'm dropping Usenet this year, for example. It's time.) So far, I still see benefits.

In other news, you can create an ad-free community, still, which was the one thing I was worried about.