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

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.

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.<p>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.

The point is that we never were even given the OPTION of paying for Twitter.<p>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.)<p>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.

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.

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.

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.<p>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?

<i>"..if users are supplying the majority of your content, it seems churlish at best to charge them for the privilege of doing so."</i><p>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?

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.<p>There are 3rd party apps that do something similar to archiving/auto-bookmarking: Trunkly was awesome, then they were acquired and integrated into Delicious (<a href="http://blog.delicious.com/2012/03/tweet-a-link-save-a-link/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.delicious.com/2012/03/tweet-a-link-save-a-link/</a>) and that is very cool. There are also amazing apps that provide personal social analytics. See <a href="http://www.simplymeasured.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.simplymeasured.com</a>. I'm on Twitter or using a Twitter client a lot. If these features were native to Twitter, they would be worth paying for.<p>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.<p>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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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!").

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

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.<p>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.