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Livejournal permanent accounts
LJ is offering permanent accounts in a one-week sale, starting on the 21st.
I'm ... torn. My first thought was "Oh, hell yeah!", because I love my paid account features and will probably continue having a paid account for the near future. Plus, more userpics!
But then I got to thinking about it. The permanent accounts cost $150. A paid account is $20 yearly, so that means it'd take nearly 8 years to recoup. In 8 years (2015) will I even still be on Livejournal? Let alone interested in having a paid account? I mean, thinking about all the changes in my Internet browsing habits over the LAST eight years ... I haven't got a clue what I'll be doing when I'm 39. I may be completely out of fandom and have abandoned this LJ. Or fandom itself may have completely abandoned LJ and migrated on to the next shiny toy. It's worth it to me *now*, but eight years from now, I dunno.
*thinks*
I'm ... torn. My first thought was "Oh, hell yeah!", because I love my paid account features and will probably continue having a paid account for the near future. Plus, more userpics!
But then I got to thinking about it. The permanent accounts cost $150. A paid account is $20 yearly, so that means it'd take nearly 8 years to recoup. In 8 years (2015) will I even still be on Livejournal? Let alone interested in having a paid account? I mean, thinking about all the changes in my Internet browsing habits over the LAST eight years ... I haven't got a clue what I'll be doing when I'm 39. I may be completely out of fandom and have abandoned this LJ. Or fandom itself may have completely abandoned LJ and migrated on to the next shiny toy. It's worth it to me *now*, but eight years from now, I dunno.
*thinks*
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Lifetime membership in ANYTHING always makes me suspicious--after all, we had hundreds of people lose out here in St. Louis when the New Lady Fitness gyms shuttered their doors and blew away in a puff of smoke.
Perhaps lj is doing just fine, but your other reasons are very good, too. Things on the Internet have changed a LOT since 1999, and change just increases every year. I think I'll stick with spending $20 when my membership is up this November, and let the future evolve as it will.
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Heh. I hadn't really thought about that. I wonder why they don't offer lifetime sales more often? You'd think it would be very good for them to make it more readily available.
7 years is an eternity in Internet time, and I can think of lots of possible scenarios that would make me migrate off LJ. Right now I'm quite happy here, but three years ago I was in a non-fandom period and wouldn't have wanted or needed a paid account ... so who knows.
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In the end, I feel I want to be able to keep my options open, and not feel forced to stay on LJ because I made a financial investment I end up regretting.
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Eight years ago I hadn't even thought of writing fanfic. I was active in several fandom mailing lists and read fic mostly on MLs or personal web pages. ff.net was just starting to show up on the fannish radar. I'd never had a blog and never wanted one.
Three years ago I wasn't fannish at all. I'd written my last big fanfic (or so I thought...) and basically had an amicable parting of the ways with fandom. When I felt like reading fanfic at all, I looked on ff.net mostly. I'd created my Alaska living blog just for fun, as a way of staying in touch with a few friends in different states.
Today I'm more involved in fandom than I have been since the late 90s -- all different fandoms, though! I don't think I'm still in touch with a single one of the fannish people I knew back then; I don't even know what they're up to these days. I've gotten to know tons of cool people on LJ. My fanfic reading is about evenly split between LJ and ff.net, plus a few fandom-specific archives.
I haven't got the foggiest clue what the next big thing is going to be, or what I'm going to WANT to do in 2015. For all I know, I will have joined a back-to-nature cult and chucked my computer out the window. I agree with keeping my options open -- I have made so many sweeping changes in both my online life, and my personal life since 1999 (got married, moved across the country twice, changed jobs several times, bought a house) that I can't even begin to guess where I'll be in 2015!
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I think it'd be more tempting if I didn't already pay for my own web space for my website, so most of the nifty features (like picture storage space) I already have elsewhere.
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That said, Tivo once offered a lifetime membership and my husband really regrets not going for it as it would have paid for itself by now.
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I don't think I'm going to get the account. On the other hand, eight years from now I may be kicking myself...
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Online businesses also have a way of offering more and better services as time goes by -- it may be that in a few years, most of the paid features of LJ will be available in some form to the free accounts anyway. I know that hedging my bets against that is kind of silly, but you know, if I lost my cool paid features tomorrow, it wouldn't be THAT big a deal; I'd still be able to use the features of the account that I rely on most (the friends page and custom filtering and such).
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But, yep, I could still do nearly everything I do without having a paid account so if one day I can't afford it or don't want to keep paying, I could do it.