You haven't been banned from dw_news, and we can't (and wouldn't) control whether individual people ban you: banning someone on DW means you can't reply to their comments in communities as well as not being able to reply to their comments in their own journal, so when someone bans you, you won't be able to reply to them elsewhere, either.
soc_puppet was right, though, it wasn't sarcasm! I genuinely do encourage people to experiment with other forms of funding, structure, etc, etc, for small platforms, because the internet needs more small platforms with a coherent guiding vision and a well-thought-out business plan that reflects the reality of running a service, and the Dreamwidth code is a really strong starting point for that kind of experiment because, compared to other build-your-own-service packages that are out there, our code is extremely performance-tuned and can run very cheaply, comparatively speaking. Our business principles are linked in the footer of every site page: whenever we need to make a decision, that's what we go back to, because Mark and I decided in spring of 2008 when we were first having the conversations that would eventually lead to Dreamwidth existing that we were very willing to gamble that people would pay for a small, steady service that put user needs first, was built on the premise of sustainability and self-sufficiency, and didn't have any outside pressure from investors or venture capitalists to produce a massive rate of return (or to eventually IPO or sell to Google).
Every decision we've made since then has gone back to that original vision. It's worked for 15 years, and it's still working today: our upgrade rate has stayed extremely steady (and astonishingly high: seriously, I'm not joking when I say that I tell people in the industry our conversion statistics and they think I'm making it up until I show them our stats page). About 20% of our active users at any given time have a paid or seed account! (As of last night when the stats last ran, to be precise, it's 21.128%.) That's unheard of. The rule of thumb for freemium services like ours is that you should plan for no more than a 1% conversion rate, ever, and if you achieve more than that, it's a miracle. For instance, YouTube Premium is considered one of the most successful freemium models in the industry, ever, and they have about 100 million Premium subscribers for 2.7 billion monthly unique users: 3.704%.
If our prices had been keeping pace with inflation all along, we'd be doing just fine. We are still doing mostly fine! Our goal is to have six months of "runway", aka operating costs, in the bank at all times. I keep a careful eye on the financials, though, and the last few years have started to drift into the scenario where, even though the whole-year figures remain in the positive, and even though our actual income is overall steady or even increasing, the income is not increasing as fast as the costs are and we wind up pulling from our runway fund to cover some individual months out of the year. (This is because our income is a little burst-ish: we get spikes in May and December, May because of all the wonderful people who have been steadily renewing their 12-month paid accounts every year like clockwork since we first opened in 2009, and December because of the extra income from our traditional end-of-year holiday sale where you get a 10% points rebate on all purchases for future spending.)
We always make it up again by the end of the year and finish the year with positive income, but the fact that individual months are starting to drop below the baseline amortized income we need for it to stay that way is something we need to address before it becomes a long-term problem. The issue is not the amount of income we have, it's that for the first ten or so years of DW existing, the increases in our income kept up with the increase in costs caused by inflation. That's changed in the last few years. The way we originally set our prices was under the assumption that each individual paid user would be subsidizing about ten free users' use of the site, with a little bit of padding to ensure long-term stability, and the increase in cost-per-user without a corresponding increase in prices means that the ratio has slipped quite a lot over time. Raising prices to account for inflation so that we go back to the original model of 1:10 instead of the current ratio (which I haven't done the exact calculations on for a while, but I did the quick approximation for 2023 and it works out to something like 1:35) would put us back to where we were when we first launched.
It honestly astounds me that things have worked out for us financially without a price increase for 15 years, and that's partially down to the passion of our users in wanting to support a business that isn't out to screw them over, and partially down to the solidity of our calculations when we launched! (It helped that we had LiveJournal's model to look at: we based our original calculations on the assumptions that a lot of our costs would work out differently, but the reference was very useful.) But there's only so much you can do when the relative purchasing power of your prices has decreased by about 35% in 15 years.
no subject
Every decision we've made since then has gone back to that original vision. It's worked for 15 years, and it's still working today: our upgrade rate has stayed extremely steady (and astonishingly high: seriously, I'm not joking when I say that I tell people in the industry our conversion statistics and they think I'm making it up until I show them our stats page). About 20% of our active users at any given time have a paid or seed account! (As of last night when the stats last ran, to be precise, it's 21.128%.) That's unheard of. The rule of thumb for freemium services like ours is that you should plan for no more than a 1% conversion rate, ever, and if you achieve more than that, it's a miracle. For instance, YouTube Premium is considered one of the most successful freemium models in the industry, ever, and they have about 100 million Premium subscribers for 2.7 billion monthly unique users: 3.704%.
If our prices had been keeping pace with inflation all along, we'd be doing just fine. We are still doing mostly fine! Our goal is to have six months of "runway", aka operating costs, in the bank at all times. I keep a careful eye on the financials, though, and the last few years have started to drift into the scenario where, even though the whole-year figures remain in the positive, and even though our actual income is overall steady or even increasing, the income is not increasing as fast as the costs are and we wind up pulling from our runway fund to cover some individual months out of the year. (This is because our income is a little burst-ish: we get spikes in May and December, May because of all the wonderful people who have been steadily renewing their 12-month paid accounts every year like clockwork since we first opened in 2009, and December because of the extra income from our traditional end-of-year holiday sale where you get a 10% points rebate on all purchases for future spending.)
We always make it up again by the end of the year and finish the year with positive income, but the fact that individual months are starting to drop below the baseline amortized income we need for it to stay that way is something we need to address before it becomes a long-term problem. The issue is not the amount of income we have, it's that for the first ten or so years of DW existing, the increases in our income kept up with the increase in costs caused by inflation. That's changed in the last few years. The way we originally set our prices was under the assumption that each individual paid user would be subsidizing about ten free users' use of the site, with a little bit of padding to ensure long-term stability, and the increase in cost-per-user without a corresponding increase in prices means that the ratio has slipped quite a lot over time. Raising prices to account for inflation so that we go back to the original model of 1:10 instead of the current ratio (which I haven't done the exact calculations on for a while, but I did the quick approximation for 2023 and it works out to something like 1:35) would put us back to where we were when we first launched.
It honestly astounds me that things have worked out for us financially without a price increase for 15 years, and that's partially down to the passion of our users in wanting to support a business that isn't out to screw them over, and partially down to the solidity of our calculations when we launched! (It helped that we had LiveJournal's model to look at: we based our original calculations on the assumptions that a lot of our costs would work out differently, but the reference was very useful.) But there's only so much you can do when the relative purchasing power of your prices has decreased by about 35% in 15 years.