I've often thought about suggesting that someone from LiveJournal make a post every few months giving users a short update as to LJ's finances. Just a short post in
lj_biz saying, "we're doing really good, we've got a lot of money so we're buying new hardware..." or "we're going through a slower period, and money's getting a little tight." I've always felt that the reason LiveJournal stands out from all other blogging sites (and from reading comments on Brad's posts, I can tell that Brad, and many other users, share my feelings on this) is that users know LiveJournal will be around a week, a month, and even a year from now, while many other sites often fade into nothingness shortly after they're created. I believe that a post letting users know how LJ's doing financially would help maintain this feeling.Also, LiveJournal fosters a feeling of community, with an "we're all in this together" sort of spirit (for example, whenever there's a server outage, Brad/Lisa/etc.. always winds up saying something along the lines of, "trust us, this bothers us as much as it does you"). Along these lines, I think many LiveJournal users would be interested in knowing how the company is doing from time to time. Perhaps more importantly, in times that LiveJournal isn't doing so well, such a post would most likely increase the amount of paid accounts sold. If anything, reading comments to Brad (and team)'s entries about paid users has shown me that the primary reason that many people purchase paid accounts is to support LJ financially. If someone came on to lj_biz and said, "hey, we're not doing too good, we need to sell more accounts," I'm sure we'd see an increase in sales.
In short, for reasons of financial security and developing an even stronger sense of community, I believe it would be a good idea to have periodic updates on LiveJournal's financial status in this community by a LiveJournal staff member. Perhaps a "State of the Treasury" address?
