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?<p>On Facebook the consumers are the advertisers while the users/their eyeballs is the product. <p>Imagine a freemium model like Pownce. Why has it not been tried again, instead of the approach to slap ads and get going.

[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

[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.

[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.

[tuhin → btilly]

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!

[coryl]

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