31–40 of 54 posts
Why should we pay for a commodity like basic communication? The only payment they may deserve is hosting my files and posts. I should be able to set up my own server like email or XMPP. Traditional social networking paradigms are bullshit. I hope identi.ca or Tent succeed.
computer scientist in not getting social interactions shocker.
This is the paradox of "infrastructure" services. Today the telephone is an amazing thing. But their value is tied up in the network effect (other people have them so you can use them to call). If nobody has a phone, you buying one has little value, if everyone has a phone then you want one because you can talk to everyone you know.
So Facebook is 'cool' when everyone you know has a presence there, it is 'not cool' when you don't know anyone there. Charging a subscription now, is not plausible, people will leave. Instead you need to sell entire groups and then charge them a subscription fee. Fortunately we have a really great example of someone doing exactly that, it was called Yammer. Put everyone in your business on Yammer (it felt like they just changed the CSS assets in the Facebook code, seriously) and increase connectivity and communication in your team. Instant value proposition if everyone in the company is using it. So you sell a subscription to the company and boom, done.
Now if you wanted to create Facebook for Enterprise to compete with Yammer, that might be interesting, and to bake in the notion of "Enterprise" presence and "Non Business" presence into the same user account, that would generate revenue. And if you told people, "if your company signs up for Facebook for Enterprises you're personal account will also be ad free and have these additional features ...." then you can create 'pull' where people actually want to lobby for it inside.
But just doing a subscription model probably won't work.
I don't think you'd get 10% uptake on paying for an ad-free experience on a site like Facebook which is mostly teenagers with no money of their own.
Facebook is used by about one sixth of the world's population. I don't think the site is mostly teenagers any more.
Before you trot out their subscription numbers, I should point out that I know quite a few people who have multiple FB accounts for a variety of reasons. That portion goes up substantially when you add people who deliberately got rid of accounts and then created new ones.
Unrelated but why hasn't Facebook ever tried to become a payments platform? They certainly have enough users and I'm guessing they'd make a ton of money.
The hopeful side of me is saying it's an inside joke, because suggesting that someone models a company after Pandora seems like it could only be done in jest; if anything, I think Pandora is an example of how to succeed in technology and fail in commerce.
The cynical side of me is saying that this is linkbait with the purpose to generate clickthrough to Biz's startup, Jelly.
Ah, the old "if even of people pay for it, we're golden!" thing. I'm going to go sell rocks at a concert for $1m a pop. The concert is 100,000 people, if even 0.01% pays for them, I'm rich!
Talk about a great analogy. Selling rocks vs a Subscription model to the biggest social network on the planet.
Honestly, the idea of a facebook subscription is not a new idea, nor is it a feasible idea. It is something people have discussed on HN about for years now. Not to mention $10 a month is unrealistic in every developing country where roughly 40% of facebooks users are based (brazil, india, indonesia ...)
Holy flashback! I was sitting in Sun trying to explain why the next version of NFS could not be a 'pay' version to SunSoft leadership, and then President Ed Zander said "Chuck, look how many people use NFS, if we got $10 for only 10% of the seats out there we'd fund this company on that." To which I replied, "If you charge $10 then 10% of the seats will be 0 since there will be no seats." This is the paradox of "infr…
From the article:
> For $10 a month, people who really love Facebook (and can afford it), could see no ads. Maybe some special features too.
Biz isn't suggesting a paywall here; he's suggesting a freemium model. I'm not sure people would leave if Facebook merely announced that people could pay $10/month for extra features if they felt like it.
Of course, I have my own concerns about ad-free premium services... it creates a socio-economic divide between those who can afford to avoid advertisements and those who cannot. Not the end of the world, but it gives me pause.