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.
(no subject)
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.