Comments | no_lj_ads: Why is Livejournal more expensive to run than Blogspot?

karcy in no_lj_ads

Why is Livejournal more expensive to run than Blogspot?

Apr 06, 2008 11:56

Hello all,

I was wondering if someone could answer this question I have. How much does it cost to run Livejournal -- or rather, why does it seem more costly to run than Blogspot?

I've been looking at some of the past entries and the community's memories, but I don't see anything closely related. I know that there are some people here who work or ( Read more... )

livejournal alternatives

Comments 26

dangerousedge April 8 2008, 02:26:51 UTC

I work in marketing/advertising and can tell you we give away a lot of freebies. Sales and marketing are all formula. We know a good national speaker will sell 15% to 20% of the room - regardless of how many people are sitting in the seats. Obviously the more people, the more sales generated and the more revenue for us ( ... )

fredtheavenger April 8 2008, 09:24:44 UTC

People have already covered most of the main reasons, but also: Google are very good at running huge datacentres cheaply, with very flexible load balancing, and shares the costs of running them accross serveral services: the servers in the datacentres run as "cloud", allocating more servers to services which need more dynamically. I doubt it's still the case, but Google's first datacentre used servers they put together so cheap, they didn't have cases - they just sat on trays in racks, and they weren't worth pulling out when a drive failed.

anildash April 12 2008, 22:48:36 UTC

By any measure you'd use to track LiveJournal's income and expenses, Blogspot (and Blogger) loses money. It's impossible to do a direct comparison because of the efficiencies Blogger gets by being part of Google's infrastructure, but it's not even close to breaking even.

WordPress.com has advertising on all its blogs, and if you want to run your own ads, it's somewhere around $4000 a year. Even just trying to customize your blog/journal as you can with a paid LJ account seems more costly than on LJ.

I'm not affiliated with SUP or anything, but I know the economics of these kinds of services very well, firsthand, and LJ still seems like a pretty good deal, at least from the what-you-get-in-exchange-for-your-money (or ads) perspective.

sukeban April 14 2008, 11:13:52 UTC

WordPress.com has advertising on all its blogs

It's funny, but you can check the "hot" posts at wordpress.com and I have yet to see any ad on them.

http://botd.wordpress.com/top-posts/?lang=en

Unless you count the snap.com previews, but they aren't advertisements... or at least they weren't when they were implemented in LiveJournal. Right?

and if you want to run your own ads, it's somewhere around $4000 a year

"Adsense, Yahoo, Chitika, TextLinkAds and other ads are not permitted to be added by users. Please send us feedback if you’d like to put ads on your blog - we are considering such a feature for a future upgrade."
http://faq.wordpress.com/2005/12/08/adsense/

If you're talking about VIP hosting (which does allow for ads), it's for the really, really big sites that need load balancing and consume a lot of bandwidth to serve humorous pictures of cats with funny captions. Then ( ... )