But these are not charities, and compete based on their business model in terms of subscriptions, advertising, merchandising, tie-ins or whatever.
Obviously if Facebook suddenly became 10EUR/year how many would defect ? Are their unique benefits worth that ? Where is the resistance point ?
To say that users will not pay is misleading. A large proportion may not but those that don't may not be valuable to your market in any case.
Again its value for money. Friends Reunited had almost every member of my school and university listed in one place. (At one time I considered this useful) 5GBP was cheap to establish contact with them, but their (FU) difficulty was ensuring that users come back for updates and maintain their subscription.
BigD
Quote:
Originally Posted by peachy  People spend all there time throwing vampires at one another because it is free, Facebook already have paid bits/apps/services and that is fine. If they try to take away the bits that are free in charging for them they will run into big problems. Everybody who is on there and maybe logs into the site once or twice a month only to delete the spam they have been sent will not pay, and then Facebook looses it's single redeeming feature, that everybody is on it.
If you think Facebook is too popular to fall then think again. Did you think the same about MySpace? Did you think that AOL or Ask was a dominant search engine? Hotmail a dominant mail provider? This is a really cut throat market and it is so incredibly easy for somebody to offer something better or more appealing the first mistake you make. |