Plus Account



Plus Accounts are sponsored by ads and have an abridged portion of LiveJournal's Premium Features. If there are ads on your profile and journal and on the site application pages, you have a Plus account.

You cannot remove the ads on your journal and retain your Plus account, but we have a guide on Switching from Plus to Basic. Basic accounts don't have ads on the journal or profile, although they see ads on the journals of Plus users and other site advertisements such as Sponsored Communities on the front page and Amp'd Mobile branding from TxtLJ.

We also have categories on Ad Blocking Techniques and LiveJournal Advertising. Please note that we do have an anti-ad bias, and much of our information is prioritized accordingly.

Plus Accounts were formerly known as Sponsored+ Accounts. This name change, as well as renaming Free accounts to Basic accounts, was announced in lj_releases on 2006-06-29. Criticism of the name change includes obscuring the sponsored and advertisement laden nature of the account; reasons supporting it include simplifying the name into only letters.

Plus Options
Plus users should use S2 styles, which have a greater flexibility: the ads can be placed vertically or horizontally and they are testing an option that puts them in between entries.

History and Statistics
There are two posts detailing the initial introduction of ad sponsored accounts to LiveJournal:


 * Punching the monkey, made by bradfitz , first introduces the idea on 2006-03-08
 * Introducing a new account level, made by ljkrissy , introduces it to the general LJ public on 2006-04-18

Plus became the default personal account level selected during the account creation process on about 2006-04-27, shortly after its introduction.

Sometime in May, not enough people had signed up, which helped inspire the creation of CProd to let people know about the sponsored account level as well as other site features not related to ads that people did not know about. Now, of course, the executives report that about 25% of active accounts are Plus and that the majority of new accounts "choose" the Plus level. We believe most of this gain has to do with the default effect.

Plus was introduced for communities and became the default account level selected during their creation on approximately 2006-06-30.

Plus became the only account level available to new users as of 2008-03-13.