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How much cash does Six Apart really need? Just as the blogging company takes more venture capital, its community site, LiveJournal, finally slides from ad-free to ad-friendly. Here's the history of one clause in LiveJournal's "Social Contract."

April 2004:

We stand firm in saying that we will:
Stay advertisement free
It may be because it's one of our biggest pet peeves, or it may be because they don't garner a lot of money, but nonetheless, we promise to never offer advertising space in our service or on our pages.

February 2005:

We operate the LiveJournal service with the following goals:
Avoid banner advertisements
As it's one of our larger pet peeves, we have avoided putting banner advertisements on the site. Although our Terms of Service permits us to change our policy in the future, we've found throughout the past few years that our "paid accounts" business model has, so far, made banners ads unnecessary.

Now:

[...]

Not that the new Sponsored+ account level is evil or anything

Social contract, April 2004 [LiveJournal]
Guiding principles, February 2005 [LiveJournal]
Guiding principles, current [LiveJournal]