semi-regular business Q&A session

[mark]

It's been a while since the last one, so denise suggested that we do another Dreamwidth-the-Business Q&A session.

But first, some data. One of the things that we promised when we started this site - and still do! - is that we will be open with the details of how the business is run, how it's doing, where your money is going, etc. Given that, here's the breakdown of our first few months of operations (discounting May):

June: $7,500 income
July: $5,000 income
August (thus far): $2,500 income

This is pretty much what we expected. More people buying accounts towards the beginning of the site, tapering off as we come up towards the various renewal periods. We're comfortable with these numbers and trends so far.

Our current monthly expenses come to about $6,000. This breaks down roughly 50/50 into "server costs" ($3k/month) and "people costs" ($3k/month). We are presently paying a few people as contractors to do time-sensitive and business-critical work for us. (Systems administrators, ToS enforcement, and some development time.)

We are not, currently, paying any salary to Denise or myself. (Which is one thing we really hope to fix...but stay tuned for today's news post.)

Summary:

Dreamwidth is running slightly in the red, but has enough money in the bank to keep the site running for several years at the current run rate. We have a few things in the pipeline which we hope will allow for us to increase the attractiveness of the site to paying customers (features) as well as give us more sources of revenue (credits, virtual gifts, etc).

There will be more data about our next-6-months plan in the upcoming news post. But for now, if you have any particular questions about the business, things you want clarified, or anything, please comment. Denise and I will be happy to answer!

Comments

[kareila]

We are implementing vgifts. It's bug 215 and I'm designing the system.

The way I'm planning to handle this is to require the recipient to accept/refuse each separate gift. Accepted gifts are displayed on the user's profile for a few weeks, and refused gifts get dropped from the system.

There will also be many levels of control to choose from when deciding who can send you vgifts: anyone including anonymous, registered users, circle, access, specific trust group and none.

Banned users will not be able to send vgifts as that is a purchase and all purchases already have ban checks in place.

I had not planned on supporting rate limiting. If you get a bunch of unwanted vgifts, you can refuse them and reset your vgift permissions to not allow similar future gifts.

[azurelunatic]

That does not work so well if timed vgifts are also a possibility. To put this in perspective -- April Fool's Day, an anonymous wit sends 100 ponies to most Support volunteers. That's 100 each, not 100 distributed among the lot.

I would not want to accept 100 ponies, even if I am fine with 100 ponies grazing on my profile. Similarly, I would not want to have to refuse 100 vgifts from someone who had taken a dislike to me.

This is not perhaps such a big deal if there will be no free vgifts (in this case, it was some Support-related silliness, with the limited selection of free LJ Support vgifts) but if I should happen to get some nutbag who wants to spend $50 once to annoy me, they may be out $50 but I have to clean up.

[princess]

Is it possible to individually reject by user? So if UserX sends me 100 ponies, can I reject his first one, and when I do so, tell the system to throw out all the other ones too?

[kareila]

Yeah, I could have the rejection check for other queued vgifts from the same user and allow you to reject them all at once. That's a good idea.

[princess]

Thank you! I'm glad I thought of it then!