One hundred days of loneliness. SUP bought the entire LiveJournal from SixApart. What's next for bloggers?
Egor Bykovsky
editor-in-chief of Vokrugsveta.Ru
It was a long time ago, a very long time ago. So long ago that only the most ancient old people remember it. This was when the Internet was still small and computers were big. It was February 2001, gloomy and chilly. The author of these lines somehow stopped by his old friend Sasha Gagin; he was so immersed in the new network "thing" that he even played the hospitable host somehow casually, out of duty. “Look,” he dragged me to the computer, “this is what Leibov (r_l) dug up on the Web through Verbitsky, just look! LiveJournal is called, amazingly convenient thing.
Seven years of LiveJournal
Misha Verbitsky on his website (the word “blog” has not yet become a custom) imperium.lenin.ru wrote from overseas far away on December 22, 2000: “blog.http://www.livejournal.com/. For the sake of such sites, the Internet exists, yes. There, like, people sit around the clock and talk about themselves, hundreds. December 22 for me was the day on which I always brought my mother a bouquet with the words "thank you for giving birth to me, and not to anyone else." That's why, according to some vague analogy, I reacted favorably to Verbitsky's virtual proposal and got myself an account on LiveJournal - although its usefulness was then completely unobvious. Well, another blogger.com, think about it. At that moment, there were 70,000 LJ users, of which thirty were Russians. Now there are, respectively, 17 million and almost one and a half million. Well, who knew then that it would turn out like that.
Years later, I was sitting with LiveJournal creator Brad Fitzpatrick, lazily sipping coffee from stupid American paper cups with their feet on the table, as they usually do, and he told me that he didn’t expect any success at all. And that he did just a convenient thing "for himself." And I didn’t even think about any millions of users. Coincidence, please.
Almost seven years have passed. Now almost no one needs to explain what a blog and LiveJournal are; there are countless diary hostings on the Web in general and Runet in particular; people who were previously afraid to pick up a mouse start online diaries and “friends”; finally, the “Russian” part of LiveJournal has become one of the most influential (and widely read) Russian media, quoted in the offline press and on TV. We are used to it. And they got used to the feeling that LiveJournal is an absolutely free, self-organized community in which no one owes anything to anyone. This turned out not to be the case, and we were convinced of this.
Marketer's Dream
Thunder struck for the first time last year. The American company Six Apart, the owner of LiveJournal, has sold the rights to serve and display ads in the Cyrillic LiveJournal diaries to the Russian company SUP, founded by Alexander Mamut. And now SUP has bought the entire LiveJournal from Six Apart. The amount of the transaction was not disclosed; I believe that it will not be explicitly disclosed due to its unimaginative size. It is possible that the transaction did not include a monetary component at all. Six Apart was clearly looking to get rid of an asset that they didn't really know how to use or to whom to sell.
In the States (and not only there) there is a business model that investors aptly call "me too." Some other YouTube has been a crushing success - and half a dozen more video hosting sites will instantly appear next to it. A couple of them will be lucky: after all, if YouTube is bought by Google for one and a half billion dollars, then all sorts of Yahoo! and "Microsoft" will certainly take a little thing for themselves, too, right? The rest are deservedly unlucky. LiveJournal was among the most pioneers of blog hosting, but it was unfairly unfortunate. In America, he is now among the outsiders. Well, what is 17 million users? Here MySpace has more than 70 million, yes. Even the brand new FaceBook has almost 35.
And "Supu" in this case, why LiveJournal? And this is a completely different matter. We are with you - in Russia. Let's look at the numbers. At the moment, there are 1.34 million accounts in the Russian-language segment of LiveJournal. It is visited by almost 700 thousand people a day. Weekly audience coverage, according to TNS Gallup, is 1.347 million people (and Rambler, for example, has 2 million - the difference is not cardinal). Every fifth visitor is a leader. More than 50% of accounts belong to men. The dream of a marketer and investor. But the most important thing is not even that.
Own blog or LiveJournal?
LiveJournal belongs to the kind of projects that don't need to invest a lot of money (unlike, say, quality media). Its contents, "content", are created by the users themselves completely free of charge. And the owners of paid accounts, on the contrary, pay for their right to create this content. Of course, this plus of relatively small expenses is a double-edged sword. After all, if the content is created by itself, then no one controls it (unlike the same media), right? Hence the fears of investors and advertisers: “Where will our advertising appear?” Hence the fears of thousands, tens of thousands of users: “If someone seriously decides to make money on LiveJournal, then this someone will inevitably try to control the content. If you control the content, then, obviously, users to some extent. Users are people. Control over people is Lubyanka. Save, help, kill, guard!”
Calmly. Lubyanka is right next to us, that's true, but that the Russian, that the American LiveJournal belong to the company LiveJournal Inc., located in California (USA) and acting in accordance with local laws. It's just that its owners are not Americans now. And we, of course, live in Russia and are obliged to behave in accordance with Russian laws. Therefore, if you definitely want to whisper about secret, private and private, then in any case it is better to do this not in a public diary on the Internet. Write in a notebook and put it under your pillow. Invite your friends to the kitchen. Finally, if you don't want to leave the Web, start your own blog on your own server; it will cost about the same money as a paid LiveJournal account.
What will happen next? And then "LiveJournal" will be one of the largest players in the social networking market, and "SUP" will finally begin to return the funds spent. I believe that the current owners of LiveJournal will focus on building large communities; well-known thousands of bloggers will gradually leave sin on their own blogs, limiting themselves to broadcasting their content on LiveJournal. And non-famous bloggers will not even think about who owned and owns LiveJournal - they will simply register where most of their friends already “sit”. Meanwhile, SUP's top managers, having celebrated the deal, published a 100-day LiveJournal development plan, which involves major changes in the interface and functionality. Those who were about to leave froze on the threshold, half turning around. Let's see. Let's wait.
