News today (via Abi of, amongst other things, the excellent Craftycrafty blog) that SUP, the Russian mediatech group that acquired Livejournal from SixApart for a hefty $30m at the top of the bubble, is laying off staff. Valleywag speculates that it is even more difficult to monetise the home of a Harry Potter erotica circle than some other social nets as advertisers are wary of association.
Well and good - big news that there's not a lot of money in running mass-market brand ads over an unmoderated - and in this case virulently anti-censorship - social net.Personally I have five years of almost daily journal on Livejournal; five years of journal I'd be loathe to simply lose and which it would be a considerable hassle to download or move elsewhere. So, at least as a one-off, it should be pretty easy for SUP to monetise LJ before, if, it closes the site down - I'd pay for an easy way to keep a long-standing personal blog, more for somewhere else to put it, and I expect others would too.
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