Well, today's LJ cross-post made it into the top 25 LJ posts. Which these days is hardly an achievement; according to the rather crude site stats LJ offers, that amounts to approximately 70 visitors. But anyway, while I have the attention of the last few dozen people still clinging to LJ, some publicity:
My amazing brother
![[twitter.com profile]](https://imgprx.livejournal.net/08d4f60342f904a39ed27b57a42ebb355b855fd0/yubL2VWA5QKa0G72PrnnFVPybD3V7yHmuGfAe_UaoZ0a608eqeeh6xxeSeBr_PVd1e_0NlHwLiQh6Ax5D0Uxhg)
angrysampoet has achieved a minor life ambition: he's playing
The Junction in Cambridge. Headlining a Hammer & Tongue poetry slam on Friday 6
th November. I really want to go, but I can't because there's no way I can get to a Friday evening gig five hours' travel away from where I'm teaching on Friday afternoon. So I'm telling you lot about it instead, I think a fair proportion of my circles live in or near Cambridge.
And my equally amazing baby sister,
berksonbakes, has set up a website for her
bespoke gluten-free baking business. At least some of her cakes can be sent by post, so anyone in mainland Britain can order from her. And she really is doing bespoke stuff, she'll make four or six individual slices of cake, or she'll cater a whole event. She's pretty good at other dietary restrictions too, eg vegan, nut-free etc.
I prefer comments at Dreamwidth. There are currently 
comments there. You can use your LJ address as an OpenID, or just write your name.
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| From: |  hairyears |
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| Date: | October 23rd, 2015 06:40 am (UTC)
12 hours after journal entry, 06:40 am (hairyears's time) |
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Seventy views, and it's in the top 25...
I read that as the top 25%, then re-read it. Top 25. Is that for all of LJ, or not-Cyrillic LJ?
I guess LJ's working well enough as a social site for us - for you, a private individual rather than a celebrity or a well-known blogger, 70 views of an update for friends is pretty good - but the numbers imply that there's no commercial viability for an advertising-funded LJ.
Time to run the backup app again, I guess.
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| From: | livredor |
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| Date: | October 23rd, 2015 11:25 am (UTC)
17 hours after journal entry, 11:25 am (livredor's time) |
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Overall top 25 posts, yes. I know they separate personal journals from communities, and I think they probably separate non-Cyrillic too.
I'm not particularly impressed with 70 views, given I get over a hundred unique visitors on every post on DW, and several hundred for anything that generates discussion and picks up a couple of links. And part of me would quite like a wider reach than that, but this sort of blogging doesn't scale well, and if I had thousands of readers rather than a couple of hundred I'd have all the problems of being female and opinionated on the internet.
I'm basically always in favour of regular backups. But I don't think LJ's future is quite as rocky as you're inferring from these numbers, because advertising isn't their main income stream any more. In fact I personally think all of the ad-supported web is basically doomed, I think the writing's on the wall even for Facebook, which is completely designed around advertising. However in LJ's specific case they're mainly making money from hosting big communities like
ohnotheydidnt; these communities have a massive reach, in the millions not the hundreds, and they're paying LJ what is rumoured to be fairly big money for tailored and ongoing tech support. Plus micropayments, eg for premium journal styles, custom user-heads, paying for promotion on the front page etc. I have a permanent account so I don't see it much but I get the strong impression LJ advertising is much less intrusive than it was a few years ago.
That'sa big part of the reason why I started up cross-posting again, because although they still show adverts, ad revenue is not the main engine driving the site any more. I think LJ's customers are big gossip communities, including in the Far East as well as the US, who are basically irrelevant to my life. It's in LJ's interest to keep things going so it works as
a social site for us - for you, a private individual
, because part of what they're offering to the paid communities is an audience of people who find the experience of journalling here pleasant. Which means my writing and usage is only indirectly the product being sold to others.
proud