Moo Harder!

LiveJournal entertains me, and not only because so many of users throw fits of hysteria at the drop of a hat. For a very long time, it survived entirely on selling subscriptions to about 5% of its users, upgrading their accounts for extra avatars, picture upload space, and a few spiffy (if rarely-used) extra features. Every so often, it sells permanent upgrades, typically for $150.

This five percent is, by definition, LiveJournal’s most profitable five percent of users. Out of these five percent, permanent accounts are, I suspect, the best deal… for LiveJournal’s coffers. $150 buys five years of upgraded service, not counting the interest earned by not paying up-front. I suspect that a Permanent account actually stays profitable more or less forever - on a commercial scale, a gigabyte of bandwidth costs about fifteen cents, a gigabyte of storage about the same - but they get less so if they’re active for more than five years. For comparison, LiveJournal has only existed at all for nine years this March, and as a paid service for eight this September.

Unfortunately, once a user buys a permanent upgrade, that user immediately and forever-after becomes deadweight to the company, an expense that has no hope of bringing in future revenue. Let me repeat that - permanent account holders are not LiveJournal’s customers. LiveJournal has precious little incentive to care what they think. Customers write checks. Once LiveJournal cashes the user’s check, a permament account is a liability, pure and simple.

In 2006, though, they found a way around this problem, which recently became the default for new users: the ad-supported upgrade. I think this was a brilliant decision, in this twirling-moustache, corporate-Machiavelli kind of way. The advertising program means that permament and basic accounts, which ordinarily generate no revenue, are still financially valuable - LiveJournalers (LiveJournalists?) maintain extensive lists of interests and associations in their profiles. This giant database can be mined, and the interests and demographic information mined to target advertising to their friends.

I suspect that people willing to pay $20/year or more for LiveJournal are probably pretty good at keeping their profiles up-to-date, people willing to pay $150 up-front even more so. That’s good, and very important in this business model. Targetting is money in advertising-land.

I have a point in this long and rather unwieldy setup, a reason for this little Gedankenexercise.

You Should Post Some More

“You should post some more,” she tells me, running her fingers through my hair. “People’ll start thinking you’re dead.” Y’should post s’more. People’ll staht thinkin’ ya dead. She lilts the words, just a little, her light Georgia accent not nearly strong enough to drawl.

I’m sleeping. I know it. She is the girl in my dreams, for a long time the only one and even now the only one who stayed. Not a muse, she is my friend and I suppose my sometime lover, a private blessing born somewhere deep in my subconscious mind. It’s been eight years since I last heard her voice aloud. Really it belongs to Evette, to the girl I loved in high-school, to the girl who taught me to love myself, but my girl-dream kept it for me and made it her own.

I turn my head a little in her lap, kissing at the palm of her hand before I open my eyes again. The summer has tanned her since I saw her last, but only just a shade, and the light brings out the dark, ruby fire in her auburn hair. “Tybalt doesn’t want to play today,” I murmur.

“I think you’re just happy right here,” she laughs, slipping her hands away, and her warm, black jeans press against my cheek. I don’t deny it, don’t even try, just make happy meowling noises up at her. Writing something means waking up, at least, leaving her behind again. She comes and goes as it pleases her; it might be months before I see her again. Part of me always worries that, one day, she might not come back.

She knows what I’m thinking, though, and she lifts my head, bending over me to press a kiss against my lips. “How long’ve you known me?”

“Seven years.”

“And I’m always here for you.”

Fake It

Today I’m going to tell you a story about a boy and his car. The car is the template, after all, for our first great status symbol and our first great step to personal independence, and thus, from there the Great American Love Affair. We never forget the first cars that made us stop and stare. The years wind by and men who’ve long since forgotten the names of the girls they took to Senior Prom can still rattle off the years, makes, models, and option-packages of their first cars.

Somewhere near Milpitas and not so long ago (either 2003 or 2004), there was a boy, I think, in love with the Mustang SVT Cobra. I imagine he was a boy, at least, but she may have been a girl; nobody needs a Y-chromosome to appreciate the Cobra’s beautiful, all-American brand of power and handling. Still, it suits my sense of aesthetics to believe that this was a boy, and so this is a story about a boy and a car.

The dealer, sadly, put too high a price on love, and the sticker on the Cobra weighed in at over $33,000, almost exactly an entire year’s wages for the average American man. This is a very old story, actually, at least as old as money and really as old as trade. Too frequently our wallets are too small to contain our hopes and dreams. I imagine him breathing deep in disappointment, but really this boy was still far from a pauper, modestly successful in his own right, and he let the dealer guide him around the lot, showing him less exotic breeds of pony. He might have seen the Mach 1, loud and brash as its name, and every dealer would have a few proud GTs, Gran Turismo cars built to run great long stretches of open American road.

Even these are expensive cars, though, and in time the dealer would have shown our boy the basic-model Mustangs. At $18,000 they were still badges of modest success, sports cars for those who refused to settle into the comfortable domesticity of Camrys and Accords. These, he could afford.

Still, he loved the Cobra, not the Mustang. Two hundred horsepower divided the two, to say nothing of the refinements in handling and trim. The Mustang is an American classic for its tunability, but the Special Vehicles Team had raised it to the level of art, and with the extra 800ccs of engine he could not hope to compete. Besides, the Cobra name brings a special, exclusive sort of cachet, and I am sure he dreamt of its effects on his circle of lady friends.

What would he do? He could tune the Mustang, of course, and even if it could not race the Cobra, he might well be able to match the Gran Turismo. That was a lot of work, though, a commitment to bury himself to the elbows in grease for months on end and pore over the tachometer’s wobbling like a scientist over his graphs, and he probably did not know how. The muscle-car gearhead is a dying breed. Perhaps he could drive a lesser car, something practical and boring, something economical that might let him save for a Cobra in five years’ time, but that was a desperate move. Like so many American boys, ours wanted his gratification now, when he was still young and full of flash.

No, none of these would be good enough. If this boy could not have his Cobra, he would make it.

Or fake it.