There has been a lot of speculation in the world of social media about how twitter plan to monetise their huge user base. It is a big decision for twitter as if they get it wrong, it could all come tumbling down overnight. Bombard users with adverts, and you will put them off, decide you are going to charge for accounts, and they could all walk away. The owners themselves have stated an intention to utilise paid corporate accounts rather than advertising, but that in itself surely wont bring a return on the investment they have received.
But the Social Media Insider this week made a good point in its bulletin this week suggesting that paying for elements of social media, or giving members the option to pay, may not be so much of a crazy idea by asking the question “How Much Would a Protester in Iran Pay to Have a Twitter or Facebook Account?” The political situation and media black out in Iran has once again thrown twitter into the limelight with protesters using the microblogging platform to get stories out of the troubled country. It became such an important channel for getting comment out of Iran that the US government intervened to prevent some planned maintenance which would have pulled twitter down for a few hours (read more here).
By either charging for social media accounts (it wouldn’t need to be much) you would undoubtedly lose some users. But those who are regular users and involve it in their everyday life would probably be willing to pay something. And if that figure was only a nominal $5 or so it would soon add up across millions of users. On top of that, by stripping out the infrequent users you would free up a large amount of server space and overheads too. Win, win.
There is also the option pointed out in the article of charging for additional functionality, the Facebook vanity URLs for example. A couple of dollars a pop to secure your URL probably wouldn’t have stopped millions of people for bagging theirs. The problem is of course, once you have been giving something away for so long, it is difficult to start charging for it. You could do a radiohead and ask people how much they are willing to pay, but you run the risk of everybody offering up a big fat zero. From somebody who works in the industry, I think a nominal fee for an account, or maybe a “pro” account would be easy for me to stomach, but it would need to be nominal.
What do you think? Would you pay for your twitter or St, what about spotify, last.fm, myspace, bebo or any other social tool for that matter?