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Maybe It’s Time For Twitter To Go “Freemium”

6 points by breily 18y ago

iamdave 18y ago
What possible "more features" can exist for twitter? The model is incredibly simple, wrapped around a less simple, but still crucially straightforward palette of mediums for access; and this author thinks people will pay for it? I'm pro twitter 110% but I have to play this card, and play it hard: "Why would anyone pay for Twitter after such astonishing success (when it does work)?"
- jrockway 18y ago
  Well, I assume that when Twitter gets overloaded the non-paying people would be denied access. Paying means you get 100% uptime, not paying means that twitter is down a lot. Not that different than it is right now ;)
JulianMontez 18y ago
I wouldn't want to pay money just so I can ensure that developers are able to make the site stable and reliable. Not that I don't like supporting sites that I love, but we shouldn't even have to think about paying for something like this. If I were to pay for a service, I would want features that would better my experience with the service, not ensuring that it would have a longer uptime. That's no excuse for developers to not work on scaling. If Twitter was going to head into this business model, they have to give me something that was worth paying for.
dshah 18y ago
The big challenge with the freemium model is that there needs to be enough of a separation between what is "free" and what is "premium". If the free version contains too much, people don't have enough of a cause to upgrade to premium. Too little, and not enough people use the free version. As for simply charging for uptime, the issue is kind of a "tragedy of the commons". If everyone is benefiting from the increased uptime, the folks paying the premium don't really have an incentive to pay. Finally, one of the big challenges of Twitter is that even getting folks to use the free version is non-trivial.
- nostrademons 18y ago
  The way some sites (eg. LiveJournal) have handled that is to have paid users hit a dedicated cluster. Since the number of paid users is limited (and they're paying, so you can always add more hardware), response times to the paid cluster are usually super-fast. It also has a neat viral growth aspect - several times when LJ was running slow, I complained to my friends, "Damn, LiveJournal's moving like a snail today" and they replied "Not for me. Paid account. :-)" Still didn't get me to buy, but there's a certain social pressure when they can use it and you can't. If the app hasn't yet scaled to multiple clusters, you can do something similar with an interlock that dumps the user out to a static page if server load is too high, without making any queries to the DB. I've done that on a nonprofit website, and if we'd been able to charge, it would've been trivial to check a paid users table first and let them in if they're paid, otherwise exiting with a "Server too busy" message. Heck, you could even redirect to the account signup page, saying "Our servers are overloaded now. Help out with a paid account! You'll get access ahead of all the freeloaders" and let them signup immediately.
arn 18y ago
this article presumes that's twitter's outages are because they don't have enough money to spend on the problem. Twitter seems to be very well funded. Charging $$ isn't going to fix the uptime problem when millions in VC money hasn't.
- iamdave 18y ago
  That's exactly the argument I'm trying to push.

6 points by breily 18y ago

What possible "more features" can exist for twitter? The model is incredibly simple, wrapped around a less simple, but still crucially straightforward palette of mediums for access; and this author thinks people will pay for it? I'm pro twitter 110% but I have to play this card, and play it hard: "Why would anyone pay for Twitter after such astonishing success (when it does work)?"

jrockway 18y ago
Well, I assume that when Twitter gets overloaded the non-paying people would be denied access. Paying means you get 100% uptime, not paying means that twitter is down a lot. Not that different than it is right now ;)

JulianMontez 18y ago

I wouldn't want to pay money just so I can ensure that developers are able to make the site stable and reliable. Not that I don't like supporting sites that I love, but we shouldn't even have to think about paying for something like this. If I were to pay for a service, I would want features that would better my experience with the service, not ensuring that it would have a longer uptime. That's no excuse for developers to not work on scaling. If Twitter was going to head into this business model, they have to give me something that was worth paying for.

dshah 18y ago

The big challenge with the freemium model is that there needs to be enough of a separation between what is "free" and what is "premium". If the free version contains too much, people don't have enough of a cause to upgrade to premium. Too little, and not enough people use the free version. As for simply charging for uptime, the issue is kind of a "tragedy of the commons". If everyone is benefiting from the increased uptime, the folks paying the premium don't really have an incentive to pay. Finally, one of the big challenges of Twitter is that even getting folks to use the free version is non-trivial.

nostrademons 18y ago
The way some sites (eg. LiveJournal) have handled that is to have paid users hit a dedicated cluster. Since the number of paid users is limited (and they're paying, so you can always add more hardware), response times to the paid cluster are usually super-fast. It also has a neat viral growth aspect - several times when LJ was running slow, I complained to my friends, "Damn, LiveJournal's moving like a snail today" and they replied "Not for me. Paid account. :-)" Still didn't get me to buy, but there's a certain social pressure when they can use it and you can't. If the app hasn't yet scaled to multiple clusters, you can do something similar with an interlock that dumps the user out to a static page if server load is too high, without making any queries to the DB. I've done that on a nonprofit website, and if we'd been able to charge, it would've been trivial to check a paid users table first and let them in if they're paid, otherwise exiting with a "Server too busy" message. Heck, you could even redirect to the account signup page, saying "Our servers are overloaded now. Help out with a paid account! You'll get access ahead of all the freeloaders" and let them signup immediately.

arn 18y ago

this article presumes that's twitter's outages are because they don't have enough money to spend on the problem. Twitter seems to be very well funded. Charging $$ isn't going to fix the uptime problem when millions in VC money hasn't.

iamdave 18y ago
That's exactly the argument I'm trying to push.