Help wanted

Are you able to sell web advertisements, knowledgeable about free software and LWN, and interested in taking on some work? If so, LWN.net would like to talk to you; please read on for details.

LWN's business model is a bit of an anomaly; there are few sites, anywhere, which get by primarily on subscriptions from their readers. There is a lot to like about the subscription model; among other things, it ensures that our real customers are our readers, not our advertisers. That keeps our priorities where they should be. But making an exclusively subscription-based model work is not an easy thing to do. Support from our readers has taken us a long way, but we're still not where we should be.

Need we add that the economic turmoil seen over the last year hasn't helped?

The truth of the matter is that advertising needs to be a part of the revenue mix if LWN is to be viable. What is also true is that LWN's staff is terrible at selling advertising. We are engineers, not sales people; we lack the skills, contacts, and interest required to do a good job at ad sales. And, we think, our readers would rather we focused on technology and writing instead of making phone calls. In the end, if advertising is going to play the part it must in keeping LWN going, somebody else is going to have to help make that happen.

What we are hoping is that, out there somewhere, we can find an advertising sales person who is willing to work on a 100% commission basis. We need somebody who is not only good at what they do, but who also understands free software and the LWN reader community. We should not have to explain why ads which get between our readers and our content are not acceptable. We can't put time into pushing back against "Get the facts" campaigns and their like. We need, in other words, somebody who can be as fussy about what goes onto LWN as we are.

It's a challenging job, to be sure. We are more constrained than many sites in terms of what we can accept. LWN's readership is also highly spread out across the world. But, out there somewhere, there must be somebody with the skills and the interest in taking on a challenge like this. If you are that person, please send a note to sales@lwn.net, and we'll talk. Or if you think you know that person, please draw their attention to this post.

