

Ask HN: Why are social networks not using freemium/paid models? - tuhin

Would you pay for a social network where you can share updates/photos/memories with @users/groups in private/public or has Facebook/twitter spoiled us too much giving it all for free?&#60;p&#62;On Facebook the consumers are the advertisers while the users/their eyeballs is the product.
&#60;p&#62;Imagine a freemium model like Pownce. Why has it not been tried again, instead of the approach to slap ads and get going.
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alexbosworth
With the facebook credits for games, fb is going freemium, just in a
roundabout way.

Twitter could partner with Apple maybe and do the same thing? For my twitter
app i know it wouldnt make much but I might add some paid features if it were
easy

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mopoke
If you look at a site like FriendsReunited
(<http://www.friendsreunited.co.uk/>) in the UK, they used to charge an annual
subscription (around GBP 5 from memory) for you to contact people that you
found on the site. And that was pretty much all the site did. Along came
facebook and friendsreunited quickly suffered a decline in users - even after
they abandoned their subscription model. The site is, for me, next to useless
as there are so few active users on there. And so a spiral of decline begins.
You need users - lots of them - to make a social site work. To illustrate the
decline in value of FriendsReunited, they went from a sale to ITV in 2005 for
GBP 120 milion to a sale in 2009 for just GBP 25 million.

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btilly
Your assumption is wrong. Look at <http://www.classmates.com/> for an example
of a social product that tries to charge up front.

Social products depend on getting a critical mass of people. Unfortunately
charging money anywhere along the process makes it difficult to acquire that
critical mass.

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tuhin
I am not talking about charging money for the core feature. But say features
like customizable profiles, more upload bandwidth, Allow Downloads for your
content in high res, allow embedding social activity from other sites in
profile?

Not looking for a straight off binary reply, but more of a discussion on how,
why, why not!

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coryl
LinkedIn uses a premium model, wherein you get communication privileges (for
contacting prospective hirees or employers I suppose) by paying for them.

