When starting out 20six in Europe LiveJournal was very much our role
model. The press as well as the blogosphere hardly took notice of
LiveJournal. The services that was most written about was blogger in
the press and MT in the blogosphere. But nobody gained as many users as LiveJournal and especiallly
the activity rate of LJ users was (and still is) high above
average.
Take a look at LJs
stats
you can see that they have almost 100.000 paying customers which should
give them yearly sales of around $ 2m. I do not believe that any
blogservice including Six Apart comes close to that number.