This is a general post to all those who are saying that since fandom is such small portion of LJ's userbase, we aren't significant to them. I don't think that. I don't think that at all. Let's look at some numbers, shall we?

[Warning: Lots of fuzzy maths and suppositions, due mostly to LJ having moved critical stats from the stats page, damn them.]

The ones I see bandied about most are these two: the number of journals created, which is 13 million, and the number(s) coming from fandom_counts, which currently stands at around 30,000.

Let's clear up some misconceptions about that first number. As a quick glance at the stats page shows, of those 13 million accounts, only 8 million have ever updated. That number is irrelevant, since we all know some people who just have an lj to join communities/comment with and don't ever put anything in it. But we don't have to worry about that because LJ gives us another number: the number of accounts "active in some way," which is 2 million. That number is a lot smaller than the 13 million we started out with.

LJ says around 600,000 journals have updated in the past week, but due to contradictory language on different parts of the site regarding the "updating in last 24 hours" statistic, it is debatable whether this means individual journals that have updated in the past week or individual posts made, possibly in the same journal in the past week... which are very different things and leave us with very different numbers. I'm going to assume that when they say 600,000 journals updating in the past week, they do mean the number of journals and not the number of individual posts.

So, when you look at those numbers, fandom is a much larger chunk proportionally. And, probably importantly, fandom likely has a much larger paid:free/plus ratio than the rest of the community. Anecdotal evidence: No one I know from my RL account (except me, since I could never do without extra userpics) has a paid account. I only know a handful who have plus accounts. LJ Stats used to have the number of paid vs free accounts on their page, but those have been removed (with the introduction of plus accounts?). From what I remember, though, paid accounts were 1% or less than the total number, and they were keeping the servers running on whatever money they made from that... and that was before the advent of extra userpics and vgifts and so on. I doubt that many people dropped their paid accounts in favor of plus ones and I also bet, all things considered, that as the number of total accounts increased the number of paid accounts increased proportionally. It stands to reason, then, that most if not all of LJ's overhead is covered by paid accounts and extras.

fandompays is showing that about 2000 people responded to the poll as having paid accounts and another thousand have additional userpics, and using extraordinarily fuzzy math here (to also account for the numbers that show money being exchanged that I didn't look at closely) we're getting that the 2500 fandom members who had responded to the poll when I looked at it have spent an absolute minimum of $70,000 on LJ in the past year alone. I actually think this number is over $100,000, but I was too lazy to do the exact maths and was just eyeballing it.

Only around 2500 people responded to the fandompays poll, while 30,000 are at fandom_counts. Even accounting for the multiple journals belonging to the same people at the latter and the response bias in the former (I'm willing to bet those with paid/permanent accounts and those who spend significantly on LJ were far, far more likely to respond... plus just those of us who can't not do every poll we come across), there are still probably quite a few paid fandom accounts. When we start trying to take into account the number of people who might not be currently checking LJ due to being on vacation, busy with work/school, or those that only check LJ on weekends, this number grows larger still.

I really don't think LJ/SA makes tons of money from this operation, and given the theoretical number of paid accounts and the fact that these are likely supporting overhead (possibly plus some), losing what is a significant portion of the paying population would put a financial strain on the company since no company likes losing revenue. No, LJ/SA does not need us now that they have their fancy advertising, but if my suppositions about the money things are correct, they'd still very much like for us to stick around.

With that said... I doubt we're leaving LJ anytime soon. We're too entrenched. Any exodus from LJ would be slow and arduous. Just so we get the obligatory biblical reference out of the way, it would be like MOSES GETTING LOST IN THE DESERT FOR FORTY YEARS. Except I sincerely doubt that what his people were saying was "the porn! but WHERE is the PORN!?!?"

Also, if you can correct any mathematical errors or errors in logic on my part, please do so.