Somebody recently invited me to a Facebook group called “We Will Not Pay To Use Facebook. We Are Gone If This Happens” (currently with 3,815,847 members).
Apparently in light of Google’s interest in Twitter, I’ve been seeing people talking about how they’re not going to pay to use Twitter.*
What I want to know is, what makes these people think Facebook and Twitter have any intention of ever charging users for their services? It has become abundantly clear that social sites are valuable because of the content they create and the users they attract - that value is much more than what individual users would be willing to pay for the utility they derive from the sites. Site owners can hardly have failed to notice this.
So not only is there no reason to think Facebook, Twitter, or others would think it wise to start charging for services, there’s no precedent. What social sites/services have started out free and gone pay? Blogger? Gmail? Wordpress? Flickr? MySpace? Friendster? Orkut? Some have prospered, some have failed, but none have gone pay-only. (Some certainly charge for added services, but I don’t think many people have a problem with Flickr, for example, letting you pay for even more storage space.)
I can only think of one site that’s gone pay, and that’s Salon’s Table Talk. Haven’t heard much about Salon lately? Yeah, me neither. I don’t think other entrepreneurs are going to be taking their business decisions as a model anytime soon.
*funny that I now think “seeing people talking” is a valid construction.