6 ms·

Free vs. paid: Would Twitter be better if you paid for it?

38 points by apievangelist 14y ago

zdw 14y ago
The point is that we never were even given the OPTION of paying for Twitter. Everyone else has "Pro" accounts - think Reddit or Flickr. You get those, and you get a few nice perks (no ads, higher upload limits, etc.) If Twitter offered a $5/month service offering that allowed your account more API access, deeper history, a "Pro Member" badge on the account, and the ability to turn ads on and off, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
- robryan 14y ago
  They should charge for verified accounts, I think they have passed a critical mass where the big names on Twitter aren't going to leave because of a cost. I would also charge a smaller amount for business accounts in general but give them some deeper analytics.
JulianMorrison 14y ago
Twitter would be empty if you paid for it. Nearly all the content is generated by people who simply wouldn't have the money to spare. And the people who do, would see no use in talking to an empty room.
akkartik 14y ago
"..if users are supplying the majority of your content, it seems churlish at best to charge them for the privilege of doing so." I thought the point of app.net was to provide a real-time syndication service between developers. Even if the functionality is superficially similar to Twitter, this isn't a content play at all. Right?
tinco 14y ago
What's with gigaom lately, are they even reporting on the same planet? First the questioning if freemium was a suitable business model for internet services, and now an article if twitter would be better if we paid for it. Obviously we wouldn't know what a twitter was if they charged up front, we'd probably all be using pwnce. Also, how can you write an article about paying money for twitter, and not mention Yammer? Yammer are the guys who found out how you make a paid for twitter work. They do freemium by proxy, twitter makes the free product and they provide the paid-for alternative.
- edwinnathaniel 14y ago
  This is probably how media company works. Milk the Juice until there's no more water. Also keep in mind today is Sunday, no serious news out there so make up something to fill the end-of-month quota?
dlsym 14y ago
Maybe Twitter should have an (official) Flattr account. ;-)
j45 14y ago
We do pay for twitter, indirectly. Whether it's a mobile app, Web apps like Hootsuite/Buffer.
- macspoofing 14y ago
  Yeah yeah. We are the product...etc.
  - j45 14y ago
    I think you may have misunderstood. I pay for twitter by giving money to software companies monthly that better let me access twitter.
ktizo 14y ago
I wonder if the future for many online services is in p2p web frameworks with distributed hash tables for public data, just to avoid the server overhead. This is something you could already do with careful use of some of the beta browser technologies and would enable the provision of many of the current social web services at a fraction of the cost, which would make much of the problem of how to pay for these services largely moot.
- anthony_franco 14y ago
  The problem with p2p is that the data is only available if the other user is also online. So in this case you wouldn't be able to see their history of past "tweets" until they reconnected. That's the problem that Opera's Unite ran into.
  - ktizo 14y ago
    You need to use a system with massive redundancy, similar to p-grid http://www.p-grid.org/ http://www.p-grid.org/
  - sukuriant 14y ago
    Usenet seemed to do find in the past. Perhaps users could adopt a similar model. Also, wasn't Diaspora working on a solution as well that involved cloning?
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  It is workable for some models, but the latency is generally going to be pretty high. It also requires a certain amount of "critical mass", and is more complicated than your plain-jane LAMP stack.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
damian2000 14y ago
The problem I can see is places in the world where there is no legal way to pay for it, where there's no PayPal, where most people don't have credit cards. Right now there's no barrier to joining Twitter - making it paid would create a new barrier. Having said that, I'm sure it would cut down on the number of spambots present, and so might have one or two advantages for those that could afford it.
macspoofing 14y ago
No way. The service needs a low barrier to entry. They could probably charge for API access however.
jameszol 14y ago
I'm fairly active on Twitter. I'm also a raving fan, enough to pay for a premium version if it were ever created. Features I would pay for: Personal analytics dashboard, some sort of auto-bookmarking/categorizing of my tweets with links, searchable archive of not only my tweets but the content I linked to, and more. There are 3rd party apps that do something similar to archiving/auto-bookmarking: Trunkly was awesome, then they were acquired and integrated into Delicious (http://blog.delicious.com/2012/03/tweet-a-link-save-a-link/ http://blog.delicious.com/2012/03/tweet-a-link-save-a-link/) and that is very cool. There are also amazing apps that provide personal social analytics. See http://www.simplymeasured.com http://www.simplymeasured.com. I'm on Twitter or using a Twitter client a lot. If these features were native to Twitter, they would be worth paying for. I doubt I will switch to, or use, yet another social sharing platform similar to Twitter, let alone pay for it without having experienced it. Getting my friends to take the early adoption route alongside me seems unlikely too. Maybe a few of my friends would join, but a large majority would not. Too many social networks have failed or aren't useful enough to me to invest any amount in. I won't be investing my money in a promise for something similar to another social network any time soon.
patrickaljord 14y ago
Any web dev could build its own twitter. What makes twitter useful is not the tech per se, it's the size of the community. Add a pay wall and the size of the community will shrink to irrelevance. This applies to any social network in general.
carsongross 14y ago
By asking this question, you deny yourself access to its answer (as well as any social-bubble VC)
jaggederest 14y ago
I'd pay for twitter to go back to 2008, when everyone on twitter was more or less by definition reasonably awesome and nobody competed for followers.
- sharkweek 14y ago
  My favorite tweets are always the ones that announce some worthless milestone of numbers of followers acquired.
softbuilder 14y ago
I politely asked them to charge me $5 a month back in 2008. http://www.youell.com/matt/writing/?p=61 http://www.youell.com/matt/writing/?p=61 Never heard back. :)
vacri 14y ago
The biggest problem of any alternative is traction. Twitter has done the seemingly impossible and gets itself mentioned in the daily news all the time. A private company is constantly advertised by news journalists - and usually in an inane manner ("on twitter, bob from footown says he doesn't like it either!").
MartinCron 14y ago
I was just thinking that I would love to have an option to pay for Facebook. Don't track me across the web, don't show me ads in the sidebar, don't show any "promoted" crap in my feed. Billions of dollars, hundreds of the best and brightest minds, years of personal data about me, my friends, and thousands of people like me and I get ads for... Applebee's. Is that really the best we can do?
- ebiester 14y ago
  The problem is the mere fact that you're willing to pay makes you infinitely more valuable.
- neutronicus 14y ago
  I think if they stopped tracking the type of person who would pay $5 for Facebook, the value of their data set would be gutted.
  - MartinCron 14y ago
    I guess they just aren't yet capitalizing on the value of all of that tracking data. The most prominent thing promoted to me today was infant formula from Wal-Mart. There are at least six things wrong with that ad: I don't shop at Walmart. I don't live anywhere near a Walmart. I don't have an infant. When I did have an infant, I didn't usually use formula. The rare times I had to use infant formula, I wouldn't use a discount retailer's house brand. I can't imagine, long term, that Walmart will continue to pay Facebook more to keep showing me junk like that than I would just to make it go away.

38 points by apievangelist 14y ago

zdw 14y ago

The point is that we never were even given the OPTION of paying for Twitter. Everyone else has "Pro" accounts - think Reddit or Flickr. You get those, and you get a few nice perks (no ads, higher upload limits, etc.) If Twitter offered a $5/month service offering that allowed your account more API access, deeper history, a "Pro Member" badge on the account, and the ability to turn ads on and off, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

robryan 14y ago
They should charge for verified accounts, I think they have passed a critical mass where the big names on Twitter aren't going to leave because of a cost. I would also charge a smaller amount for business accounts in general but give them some deeper analytics.

JulianMorrison 14y ago

Twitter would be empty if you paid for it. Nearly all the content is generated by people who simply wouldn't have the money to spare. And the people who do, would see no use in talking to an empty room.

akkartik 14y ago

"..if users are supplying the majority of your content, it seems churlish at best to charge them for the privilege of doing so." I thought the point of app.net was to provide a real-time syndication service between developers. Even if the functionality is superficially similar to Twitter, this isn't a content play at all. Right?

tinco 14y ago

What's with gigaom lately, are they even reporting on the same planet? First the questioning if freemium was a suitable business model for internet services, and now an article if twitter would be better if we paid for it. Obviously we wouldn't know what a twitter was if they charged up front, we'd probably all be using pwnce. Also, how can you write an article about paying money for twitter, and not mention Yammer? Yammer are the guys who found out how you make a paid for twitter work. They do freemium by proxy, twitter makes the free product and they provide the paid-for alternative.

edwinnathaniel 14y ago
This is probably how media company works. Milk the Juice until there's no more water. Also keep in mind today is Sunday, no serious news out there so make up something to fill the end-of-month quota?

dlsym 14y ago

Maybe Twitter should have an (official) Flattr account. ;-)

j45 14y ago

We do pay for twitter, indirectly. Whether it's a mobile app, Web apps like Hootsuite/Buffer.

macspoofing 14y ago
Yeah yeah. We are the product...etc.
- j45 14y ago
  I think you may have misunderstood. I pay for twitter by giving money to software companies monthly that better let me access twitter.

ktizo 14y ago

I wonder if the future for many online services is in p2p web frameworks with distributed hash tables for public data, just to avoid the server overhead. This is something you could already do with careful use of some of the beta browser technologies and would enable the provision of many of the current social web services at a fraction of the cost, which would make much of the problem of how to pay for these services largely moot.

anthony_franco 14y ago
The problem with p2p is that the data is only available if the other user is also online. So in this case you wouldn't be able to see their history of past "tweets" until they reconnected. That's the problem that Opera's Unite ran into.
- ktizo 14y ago
  You need to use a system with massive redundancy, similar to p-grid http://www.p-grid.org/ http://www.p-grid.org/
- sukuriant 14y ago
  Usenet seemed to do find in the past. Perhaps users could adopt a similar model. Also, wasn't Diaspora working on a solution as well that involved cloning?
sliverstorm 14y ago
It is workable for some models, but the latency is generally going to be pretty high. It also requires a certain amount of "critical mass", and is more complicated than your plain-jane LAMP stack.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

damian2000 14y ago

The problem I can see is places in the world where there is no legal way to pay for it, where there's no PayPal, where most people don't have credit cards. Right now there's no barrier to joining Twitter - making it paid would create a new barrier. Having said that, I'm sure it would cut down on the number of spambots present, and so might have one or two advantages for those that could afford it.

macspoofing 14y ago

No way. The service needs a low barrier to entry. They could probably charge for API access however.

jameszol 14y ago

I'm fairly active on Twitter. I'm also a raving fan, enough to pay for a premium version if it were ever created. Features I would pay for: Personal analytics dashboard, some sort of auto-bookmarking/categorizing of my tweets with links, searchable archive of not only my tweets but the content I linked to, and more. There are 3rd party apps that do something similar to archiving/auto-bookmarking: Trunkly was awesome, then they were acquired and integrated into Delicious (http://blog.delicious.com/2012/03/tweet-a-link-save-a-link/ http://blog.delicious.com/2012/03/tweet-a-link-save-a-link/) and that is very cool. There are also amazing apps that provide personal social analytics. See http://www.simplymeasured.com http://www.simplymeasured.com. I'm on Twitter or using a Twitter client a lot. If these features were native to Twitter, they would be worth paying for. I doubt I will switch to, or use, yet another social sharing platform similar to Twitter, let alone pay for it without having experienced it. Getting my friends to take the early adoption route alongside me seems unlikely too. Maybe a few of my friends would join, but a large majority would not. Too many social networks have failed or aren't useful enough to me to invest any amount in. I won't be investing my money in a promise for something similar to another social network any time soon.

patrickaljord 14y ago

Any web dev could build its own twitter. What makes twitter useful is not the tech per se, it's the size of the community. Add a pay wall and the size of the community will shrink to irrelevance. This applies to any social network in general.

carsongross 14y ago

By asking this question, you deny yourself access to its answer (as well as any social-bubble VC)

jaggederest 14y ago

I'd pay for twitter to go back to 2008, when everyone on twitter was more or less by definition reasonably awesome and nobody competed for followers.

sharkweek 14y ago
My favorite tweets are always the ones that announce some worthless milestone of numbers of followers acquired.

softbuilder 14y ago

I politely asked them to charge me $5 a month back in 2008. http://www.youell.com/matt/writing/?p=61 http://www.youell.com/matt/writing/?p=61 Never heard back. :)

vacri 14y ago

The biggest problem of any alternative is traction. Twitter has done the seemingly impossible and gets itself mentioned in the daily news all the time. A private company is constantly advertised by news journalists - and usually in an inane manner ("on twitter, bob from footown says he doesn't like it either!").

MartinCron 14y ago

I was just thinking that I would love to have an option to pay for Facebook. Don't track me across the web, don't show me ads in the sidebar, don't show any "promoted" crap in my feed. Billions of dollars, hundreds of the best and brightest minds, years of personal data about me, my friends, and thousands of people like me and I get ads for... Applebee's. Is that really the best we can do?

ebiester 14y ago
The problem is the mere fact that you're willing to pay makes you infinitely more valuable.
neutronicus 14y ago
I think if they stopped tracking the type of person who would pay $5 for Facebook, the value of their data set would be gutted.
- MartinCron 14y ago
  I guess they just aren't yet capitalizing on the value of all of that tracking data. The most prominent thing promoted to me today was infant formula from Wal-Mart. There are at least six things wrong with that ad: I don't shop at Walmart. I don't live anywhere near a Walmart. I don't have an infant. When I did have an infant, I didn't usually use formula. The rare times I had to use infant formula, I wouldn't use a discount retailer's house brand. I can't imagine, long term, that Walmart will continue to pay Facebook more to keep showing me junk like that than I would just to make it go away.