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For commercial television, viewers are not the networks' customers, nor are television shows, ultimately, their product. Viewers are the networks' product, and the advertisers who pay big money to reach those viewers are the networks' customers. The programming is just an intermediate step, a byproduct, or,if you will, bait.
Who are Six Apart's (LiveJournal's) primary customers? The writers and readers ("the users"), some of whom, at least until yesterday, paid for additional account features? Or the advertisers vying for the eyeballs of the "Plus" account holders and non-subscriber readers of "Plus"-level journals? (Presumably, LJ would like to consider both groups its customers, but with which group do its loyalties lie? From a business perspective, where should its loyalties lie?)
And what are the ramifications of the answer to that question, with regard to decisions faced by the content creators? An important difference between LJ and television, regardless of the answer to the question in the second paragraph, is that the 'viewers' and the 'production studios' for LJ are the same people.
[ETA: Official response from LJ/SA to the userbase regarding recent/current events was finally posted about the time I thought to start writing this entry. It may affect your reactions to the questions I ask here.]
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And yowza, LJ's comment-notification-by-email is as slow as molasses in February today. Given the rate at which comments are being added to each new
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As an incorporated business, even if not a publically traded one, isn't that set by legal fiat to "with the shareholders"?
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Also, fiction is fiction. I enjoy reading/writing/watching the occasional gory horror story. I might even sublimate the real desire to pound someone's head in into such a piece of creative drivel. It doesn't mean that I'm likely to go out and actually commit a crime. Stories in other genres aren't any different. Reading or writing a book like Anais Nin's or Anita Blake's work (and others who I can't remember) doesn't mean that one really wants their bodice ripped, to put it in PG-13 language.
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madeseemed to make sense (until they saw the nature and magnitude of the backlash) to scrub away journals bearing the "offensive" keywords regardless of context, just to be able to show the advertisers "nuffin' unsavory here, massa". Er ... assuming (as may or may not be reasonable) that the advertisers themselves were going to be more scared of appearances than context/reality.The "gotcha" being, what happens to the advertising revenue if the stream of content dries up in protest? (And the other "gotcha" being, what if SA can't afford to have either revenue source -- advertisers or paying users -- shrink much, regardless of which is larger?)
As for the fiction and the support groups getting swept up in the whole mess, that's partly an example of the "zero tolerance means never having to think" attitude (which I think you were alluding to when you said that 'decisions' were not being made by SA, right?) and partly ... well, an aspect that makes it so difficult for me to believe SA's denial of the advertising threat being the precipitating factor, just yet. I know they say, "never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity," but the required stupidity level exceeds my suspension-of-disbelief.
Regardless of whether this event indicates that we're not the customers who count, or was merely a giant "oops", it was handled clumsily, and not in a way consistent with the stated goals. Having apologized (and admitting the magnitude of the error) goes a long way; I'm still looking for clues as to whether to trust them.
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I'm still keeping my shiny-new default icon for a while.
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If interestarray() contains offensivekeyword$ then journalstatus:="deleted"
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From a business perspective, it's "which group is the more valuable investment, and who makes us money". I can't easily find how many of each account type there are in order to determine approximate income. I do know that there seem to be about one million active users. I do know that an ad would bring in income of about $2–6000 (based on current Internet advertising rates; yes, I play one in real life). As such, advertisers are the customers unless paid accounts outnumber the Plus accounts by a very large margin (more than just 100, remember that the figure is per ad, not per year, and most ads have a lifetime of one month). You would need about 1200 paid users per plus user, minimum, for LJ members to be customers as opposed to product.