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>A basic friends-only system isn't that expensive to run. The expense depends on what the baseline for "basic" is. I believe today's average consumer would w
by jasode 8y ago
>A basic friends-only system isn't that expensive to run.
The expense depends on what the baseline for "basic" is.
I believe today's average consumer would want basic features to include photos and video sharing. (This consumer expectation having been conditioned by previous $0/month social networks like Facebook.) Needless to say, this requires expensive datacenters with petabytes of harddrives. Rising storage infrastructure costs and was the #1 driver of Facebook costs in 2006. It may still be today. I don't know. I believe storage is still Snapchat's biggest cost component of Google Cloud payments.
So either run a text version of a social network or put storage limits to keep the social network "cheap" to run. My guess is that the typical non-HN type of user would prefer the ads so it's still $0 per month with the ability to share lots of baby photos.
- hathawsh 8y agoOne idea: let people pay if they want to, move old posts and videos to Amazon Glacier or similar long-term storage, and let paid users expedite the retrieval. Matching the Glacier terms, free users have to wait 5-12 hours to see old posts and videos, while paid users can see them in 1-5 minutes.
- tomashertus 8y agoWho said that the nextgen soc platform will need persistent storage? Just remove everything once it's viewed and leverage the clients for storage.
- Animats 8y agoGood point. Now a "Freemium" app might work. Text is free. Pictures up to a limit are free. A few seconds of video with an expiration time is free. More pictures, longer video, and long term storage all cost. Fortnite is "freemium", and bringing in over $1BN a year without ads.
- dabockster 8y agoI've been thinking about this myself. Small bits of text is free. The occasional photo is free. Maybe not video. You could also treat brand pages as what they really are: advertising. Charge them a weekly/yearly fee to have the ability to run such a page.