Uh-oh. Are free LJ accounts still going to be available?

[barking_iguana]

They're sure not saying free accounts are going away, but how do you make sense of the following from their annual message to users State of the Goat 2012:

We're excited to announce that by mid-2012, advertising will be phased out completely for virtually all of the LiveJournal service pages, journals, and communities that we know and love. Advertising will only be shown in select communities that opt in to displaying it (which you'll hear more about on February 15).

What's their business model? If new accounts are paid only (probably focused on shipping sites, as in LJ Singapore) will that apply to existing accounts as well?

Comments

[cinema-babe.livejournal.com]

That is oddly cryptic.

If I weren't such a cynic I'd say that they were going back to the old structure where they had two tiers of accounts: paid and free but I suspect that they're going to some kind of structure where you have minimal access unless you pay.

It's be nice if I were wring, though.

I actually always thought that the Plus account was a pretty good marketing model but I don't know what the profitability.