31August
The headlines
size accounts 13707677 453560 3.42% size accounts_active_1 508120 -19672 -3.73% size accounts_active_30 1740723 -40623 -2.28% size accounts_active_7 1075969 -28924 -2.62% userinfo total 13692953 454897 3.44% userinfo updated 8515620 199136 2.39% userinfo updated_last1 196749 -6923 -3.40% userinfo updated_last30 980963 -31782 -3.14% userinfo updated_last7 563911 -21328 -3.64%
Accounts climb by far more than the usual factor of 1.8%, but this isn't translating into growth of use. How much of this can be explained by the northern hemisphere's summer break? We'll find out next month.
Sex
gender F 3839326 102329 2.74% gender M 1880793 50907 2.78% gender U 2173364 28529 1.33%
Total sex declared: 7893483 (+181765, 2.36%) (58% of Accounts (+1%), 93% of Updated (+1).) Males are still closing the gap on females at an infinitesimally slow rate, the F/M ratio stands at 2.041 (-0.001).
Age
Here's a list of the ages with at least 100,000 people:
age 15 191878 -772 -0.40% age 16 347130 -3645 -1.05% age 17 531939 3531 0.66% age 18 628764 10131 1.61% age 19 664542 16676 2.51% age 20 631354 14673 2.32% age 21 575658 16004 2.78% age 22 500769 18864 3.77% age 23 398322 15156 3.80% age 24 330546 11767 3.56% age 25 270719 10138 3.74% age 26 230700 6492 2.81% age 27 222785 13238 5.94% age 28 146651 6341 4.32% age 29 123088 5670 4.61% age 30 106011 4324 4.08%
Total declaring an age: 6922096 (+195334, 3.73%) (88% of Sex (+1%), 81% of Updated (+1%).) Modal age remains 19, though 20 now moves ahead of 18 for second modal. Quartiles come at 18.9 (+0.1), 21.6 (+0.1), 26.0 (+0.1). The creep older continues.
Top 20 Countries
country US 3403400 2632 0.08% country RU 499818 8219 1.64% country CA 290108 547 0.19% country UK 254351 1313 0.52% country AU 120413 570 0.47% country UA 60885 1645 2.70% country SG 48222 1113 2.31% country PH 47460 245 0.52% country DE 44991 427 0.95% country FI 36069 410 1.14% country JP 29739 322 1.08% country NL 24420 119 0.49% country BY 19918 416 2.09% country IL 18736 209 1.12% country NZ 17577 97 0.55% country BR 17057 152 0.89% country ES 16880 175 1.04% country FR 16309 197 1.21% country SE 11924 99 0.83% country IE 11188 82 0.73% 224 other countries: 271635
Total countries declared: 5261100 (+21117, 0.40%) (76% of those declaring an Age (-2), 67% of Sex (-1), 62% of Active). No change in the order of the top 20, though Italy passes India for 21st. Once again, growth is almost entirely powered by Eastern Europe and Singapore, though even the fastest grower in the top 20 - Ukraine's 2.70% - is well behind overall account creation. It appears that barely one new person in six is disclosing their country - how else might we explain the 0.08% growth from US, or 82 joiners from Ireland. The gaps beneath the 20: Ireland's lead over Italy 194 (-70), over India 243 (+25), over Malaysia 854 (+11).
New section!
Figures labelled usertrans_upgrades_to_plus have been included. They show an initial spike - 33,768 people plastered commercials all over their journal in the first week, and a slow tail-off. Figure 1, below, gives the daily figures (in white) and a seven-day rolling average (in black). This graph uses a logarithmic scale.
There are two spikes: the first from 11 May 2006 followed a second News post about the new level, but we're not entirely sure why there was such a kick-up from 25 June 2007. The average for August was between 250 and 400 accounts putting commercials on.
No figures are available for the number of accounts upgrading from commercial to paid, nor from commercial to advert-free. However, it does give us a very loose upper bound on the number of accounts featuring commercials: all those counted in this new category, plus those created since commercials became the default for new accounts. We haven't been able to find an exact date for that change, but we think it was in late April 2006. We'll take 1 May as the cut-off date.
So, all accounts created in the past months to those listed above gives an upper bound of:
4,108,225 advertising accounts
Fox Fire Fey has previously researched this matter by conducting a random sample. That suggested about 25% of accounts posting on any given day - 35130 of 144141 - pushed commercials. At this time, about 308,000 accounts show in the Converted To Plus count, and 965,000 had been created since the start of May.
Further points to note: Fox Fire Fey found that only about 56% of active accounts created since late April still had adverts enabled; applying that to the figure above suggests that only about 2.3 million accounts still show adverts. Denise Paolucci, speaking for Six Apart, asserted that these figures were inaccurate, but did not offer any evidence to substantiate her claim. She has now left the company's employment, and no statistics have been released. In the lack of updated figures, the assumption that a quarter of active users show commercials still seems to hold.
Other news this month
Six Apart went back on its word by withdrawing the Feedback link to report advertisements that were offensive, noisy, or otherwise bothersome.
The company announced another competition: yet again, it was only open to the small and diminishing fraction of the users who are based in some (but not all!) of the rebellious provinces to the south of Canada and to the north of Mexico. Way to treat your customers, by holding a contest and excluding something like 80% of potential entrants based purely on geography.
Six Apart's attempts to alter its contract with its customers continued. While pictures that may or may not have been sexually explicit continued to cause a huge kerfuffle, a video apparently depicting an execution ruffled no feathers. Six Apart's Russian mafia boss said, There is a list of things that LiveJournal users agree not to do, but posting pictures of an execution is not on the list. Reports of communities actually encouraging actual child abuse were ignored. One customer summarised the situation as follows:
We're in the realms of how many angels can have gay underage sex on the head of a pin. Non-existant beings sucking fictional cock in a fantasy universe have been deemed a matter of such seriousness that a panel of employees must spend time poring over gritty questions as to whether Draco is 16 or 18 in naughty drawing exhibit A, or whether non-existent Harry having it off with non-existent Severus in exhibit B is obscene and what age could he possibly be?
Six Apart has bought into a zeitgeist of misdirected hysteria that ignores real harm to young people and sees it in absurd places instead: fan art unconnected to real children. Since they see it as a business proposition to cover themselves by policing such things, so they can attract sponsors like Pepsi and Hewlett Packard, they are not going to change it. Since the underlying premise of solemnly determining what age a fictional character might be in a sketch is ludicrous and subjective, you are not going to get a satisfactory procedure for this.
The Pepsi Cola Corporation began a large advertising campaign. This cost them sales. The campaign allowed customers to fire commercials to other people at will. After slightly less than five days, the campaign was pulled, and Six Apart introduced controls allowing people to block these commercials, and others methods of wasting money.
Six Apart has a short message for webloggers in the original sense of the term: FOAD. The original weblog was, and still is, a collection of links and commentary, a sort of tip sheet for other bits of the web worth reading. As is the nature of the web, these links are subject to decay over time. Sites go bankrupt, sites move from one structure to another, domain squatters move in. Entropy is a fundamental law of the universe, yet Six Apart pretends that it does not apply to them, and that their bodies will not eventually follow their brains and crumble into dust. The company's utterly ludicrous response to linkrot is that the customer is responsible for policing them, and their account be held to ransom if they don't.
Monty Python This Way
Six Apart is acting as though it is staffed by a bunch of clueless morons, who know so little about the internet that it's a wonder that they know where to find the power button. This is, of course, all getting so silly it's beyond professional, and probably beyond parody. Not that that's going to stop us from trying.
We're idly thinking of a conference, to which we invite various speakers from the world of technology: Seth Finklestein from Infothought; Mat S. GB, who writes Taktix, Shelley Powers of Combining Technology With Ducks, and Mena Trott who is The Fecking Arsehole. Everyone will get eleven minutes to deliver a short speech, with another fourteen minutes for questions from the audience.
Miss Trott is our final speaker, and she begins like this. "Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I'd like to talk to you..." The chair interrupts. "Miss Trott, a development. We've paid our lawyers huge amounts of money to tell us what we want to hear, and they say that we can unilaterally vary your terms of engagement. Speakers are no longer allowed to use the letter 'r'."
Flustered, the Fecking Arsehole continues. "As I was saying, I'd like to talk to you about the, um, come-back of the colour, um, ah, two to the left of yellow on the spect... prism. Oh, hell." Clearly flustered, Miss Trott continues her prepared spiel about the importance of the colour red to Web 2.0, or whatever it's being called this week.
After about four minutes of this, the chair interjects again. "Conference t-shirts are now available in the foyer. Some of them have pictures of cats on. Carry on," with a nod to Trotty.
Eventually, painfully, the time allocated for the speech expires. The first question from the floor is, "How do you hope to overcome competition in social networking, given your company is late to it?" Just as the Fecking Arsehole is about to reply, the chair interjects again. "We've paid our lawyers a really rather obscene amount of money, so that they'll tell us precisely what we want to hear. We are changing the terms of engagement again. Speakers will not be allowed to answer questions posed to them directly. Instead, they will be answered by a random guy we dragged in off the street. Ladies and gentlemen, Guy Goma."
"Um, hello, I think I'm in the wrong sketch. I was supposed to be here to talk about the dangers of negligent identification."
