LiveJournal Ties Up With Google: Lets Users Add Adsense to Their Journals

Livejournal, one of the more popular and long running blogging application has announced that it will now let its users monetize their journal. It has tied up with Google Adsense with which users can now sign up to Google’s famed monetization tool and earn ad revenue through their writing.

Annelies van den Belt, CEO of SUP, parent company of LiveJournal said, “For the first time they will have the option to generate revenue from their Journals. We have wanted to offer the LiveJournal community the opportunity to do this for some time, and we are thrilled that the Google AdSense program offered us a simple solution. It’s now up to our great community of users to sign up and keep engaging their readers.” In effect it is a regular ad sense revenue sharing feature, except that there is no revenue sharing. In the announcement that went live on their news section, LiveJournal says that users would get to keep all 100% of the revenue that Google shares with them.

So how does Live Journal benefit from this?

While on one hand it is fair to assume this will probably drive more usage on part of Livejournal users, the real catch is that this feature is available only for paid members. The membership which costs nearly $20 a year takes care of this and many other features that Livejournal as it is provided from before.

Blogging platforms not letting users have their own ads isn’t new really, WordPress.com doesn’t let users have ads for instance. Google’s blogger on the other hand is a very important tool in Google’s kitty to drive more Adsense usage. However, this point to my mind hasn’t been critical for a lot of people in deciding which platform to choose. As it is the traffic that a lot of small bloggers can generate wouldn’t be enough to sustain the blog let alone make it a livelihood. Therefore I have my reservations about this piece of news turning things around at Livejournal. However, it might perhaps interest a lot of its existing users to get on and begin to be more active in the Livejournal community.

The last we had heard of Livejournal, or rather spoke about it here was when they launched a flash fiction contest following its launch in India. I doubt if this news given its limiting nature will find any takers in markets like India.

Having said all that I think it is a good move, the result that it brings for Livejournal is a different matter altogether, they don’t have much to lose with it and only stand to gain. From a purely business perspective therefore this is a move they perhaps should have adopted quite a while ago. And while it might not have the biggest group of users, Livejournal has a sizable share of bloggers (a lot like Myspace kind of users)  in its fold and they do seem hold mixed opinions on this news.