Livejournal matters

[winter]

However I may personally feel about the LiveJournal staff layoffs, there's an official statement about them now.

Most of LiveJournal revenue is in rubles. Their labour costs were in USD. Economically, it's a textbook move, especially since they already have a Russian technical and product development team - who are paid less.

Best of luck to everyone involved, especially those who got the bad news :(

Comments

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

You're probably right; I'd love to know the proportion of users still shell-shocked about the very notion that Six Apart was an actual company, let alone that SUP Fabrik is. (This is the Internet. All good things should fall down from heaven, free, fashioned only with the bare hands of cheerful amateur pioneers operating from their parents' basements.)

[winter]

It's amusing watching these attitudes versus some other portions of the internet. It seems to have divided itself into social networks (which are commercial, ad-laden, and all this is expected) and blogs (which are ad-supported so that plucky writers can make a living). LJ's the only big place I know where people are still offended by ads.

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

It's a mystery. Perhaps there's a heavy element of web nostalgia here, echoed in that old-established rallying cry of the ten-year vets: "Brad Fitzpatrick said no ads!"

[winter]

I wouldn't put it past them. While LJ's not a walled garden the way Facebook is, it's incredibly self-sufficient with the way it functions as an RSS aggregator. For a lot of people, LJ is the internet.