LiveJournal has 22 million registered bloggers, many of them becoming increasingly prolific in what is now its native Russia – so why shouldn’t some of them start earning some rubles for their ruminations?
That’s what LJ parent Sup is now doing, care of Google (NSDQ: GOOG). The pair are plugging AdSense in to user blogs, allowing bloggers to earn revenue from Google ads that appear on their sites at dimensions and formats of their choosing. The catch? Users must already be paying for premium LiveJournal accounts to get the new feature.
In theory, it means another pay-for driver for what is one of the original blog hosts, and another little foothold in to the RuNet for Google, following the striking out, by state antitrust authorities, of its acquisition of the Begun web ad agency from Rambler last year.
The pair are calling this “Your Journal – Your Money”. LJ founder Brad Fitzpatrick, who nowadays serves as an advisor, and Annelies van den Belt, the Sup CEO who previously ran ITV.com and Telegraph.co.uk, hosted a joint announcement in Moscow on Tuesday.