Sponsored Communities

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A screenshot of a sponsored community in the spotlight on the front page.

From the LiveJournal FAQ "What are sponsored communities? How do I set one up?":

A sponsored community is a LiveJournal community that is created and maintained by another company. They can use these communities to post information about various products or services relevant to their business. For example, a movie studio can use a sponsored community to promote the release of a new movie or DVD.

Like LiveJournal communities, users who are interested in a particular sponsored community are welcome to join the community and post comments or entries, depending on the community's individual settings. All sponsored communities are noted as such, both within the community and in the community spotlight. They are also specially designated within interest searches.

If you're interested in creating a sponsored community, you can contact our Sales team.

Sponsored communities are denoted with the icon .

[edit] History

If this is specially designated within an interest search, I'm not seeing it.

Paid users could see the ads for sponsored communities on the Spotlight feature on the front page for a short period of time when the first one debuted on September 6th, 2006, but this was a bug and quickly fixed by the close of the day. (Reports of the bug were either not on RT or not publicly available; burr86 notes that not all bugs are.) However, its inclusion violates previous assertions during the introduction of Plus accounts that ads would not be shown on the front page when Paid users raised the concern that they would have to see them while logging in. Basic users are also not supposed to be subjected to advertising on BML pages, but only on the journals of Plus users; this is a departation from that policy.

There is some clarification on the purpose and function Sponsored Communities in this comment here in June 2006 by pmmarcov:

Just want to be clear about something (that's not so clear given the language of Sponsored Plus and Sponsored Communities).

We are not going to "take over" existing communities. We are going to give communities the option of choosing a new account level. That level will (we hope) offer existing communities sufficient benefits in exchange for having ads on their pages, that some communities go from being Free today to the new level when we offer it. Some will stay at Free and, just like the users who keep their individual accounts at the free level, that's their choice and we're cool with it. The ads we sell that to run on LJ will also be seen on the communities who opt-in to this level.

When we begin to offer advertisers the opportunity to build their own communities on LJ (the so-called "Sponsored Community" working name), those communities will be easily designated so that users know that these communities are not the same as LJ user created communities. They will be clearly labeled and named to avoid confusion and to be completely clear that the Cartoon Network Community is content from that company or brand.

The first known Sponsored community is scienceofsleep for the movie "The Science of Sleep". A post was made on it at pmmarcov's journal here:

Another LiveJournal first -- make a new friend!

It's official. LiveJournal has launched it's first “Sponsored Community”. It's for the upcoming movie release "The Science of Sleep".

Thank you to all who helped get this sponsorship up and running. A special thank you goes to Stacey ((chasethestars)) for a great design, Krissy ((ljkrissy)) for her marketing magic and community insights and to Joy ((joydtaylor)) for working so closely with this new partner.

It would be wonderful and we'd all greatly appreciate it if you would support this community by making it a friend. There's even a Vox QotD-like post you can reply to asking "what's the strangest place you've ever slept?".