Would You Pay For Twitter?
Over at The New Yorker there’s an excellent review today of a new book entitled, Free: The Future Of A Radical Price. The article makes some worthy points about the ‘value’ of free in light of the strong endorsement made by the book’s author and is a recommended read. (Seth Godin also recently shared his thoughts.)
I really like the observation that “free is just another price”. Twitter, of course, is a free product. It’s not too radical a proposition to suggest that if Twitter had carried a service fee from day one I almost certainly wouldn’t be writing about it now.
But Twitter needs money, and right now the business plan isn’t exactly forthcoming. One way for the platform to generate some much-needed revenue would be to charge for a premium version of the service. This would be entirely opt-in, but ‘pro-Twitter’ users might receive extras such as
- A bigger share of Twitter’s API
- A 30-second edit window for tweets
- A once-daily email digest of new followers
- Block management
- Better personal messaging capabilities
- Spam filters
- 24/7 technical support
and so on. This would be billed monthly and would carry a nominal price – maybe $9.99/month. Maybe $4.99. If you cancelled your subscription or your cheque bounced, Twitter dropped you back down to the ‘basic’ version of the service. Nothing was lost except your ability to tap into those extra features.
For everybody who didn’t want to pay, Twitter would simply carry on as is; they wouldn’t see any difference in the network at all, beyond Twitter’s standard platform updates. This is critical – there cannot be an obvious void on the front-end of Twitter (the stream) that in any way penalises the non-payer.
There will be many features that I haven’t mentioned that are important to you. That’s how I would like you to think about the question in this poll – if Twitter introduced a premium service that had the extra features you wanted – you is italicised because that’s the key part – would you pay for it? This is a simple yes/no game – you’d either pay for these extras, or you’d never pay, no matter what goodies came with a premium Twitter account.
Loading …Please feel free to expand on your answer in the comments area. In fact, I really encourage it – I’m very curious as to whether this could ever be a viable business model for Twitter.
Me? I’d be happy to pay a small monthly fee. It’s not unusual for free online services to carry a ‘pro’ alternative and I think it would be a great way for Twitter to generate some of that essential cash. But different people have different needs, and I wonder if there are enough of ‘me’ out there to make this work.
UPDATE: I’m going to add any interesting feature suggestions to my list as and when they’re made.
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It depends on what those features are of course, but if they included service level agreements, support and spam filtering, it would be an attractive option.
.-= Joe´s last blog ..Twub Quiz 7th July =-.
Nice post, I voted no.
Simply put, Twitter already has all I need, and it is Twitter’s simplicity that drew me to it in the first place. Twitter covers the basics of conversing with the bigger audience and with ease, and without much effort. The only thing that seemed remotely interesting in that list, was the block management. I really can’t think of a single thing I need as an extra from Twitter. Am I easily pleased or what?
To sum up, I know Twitter needs money, and I think the idea of a premium service would be wonderful, but free is fine for me
Twitter has some valuable email addresses/SMS/contact info. Could they not do direct marketing via email, Tweet, SMS from advertisers based on interest? They’d still own the emails, which wouldn’t be sold, but if somebody Tweets about food, that person could receive a coupon or something via email, direct message, etc., up to 3 times a day or based on a tiered level of Tweeting. The more you Tweet, the more advertising you get.
To save on sales staff, Twitter could make it a system managed by the advertiser, similar to Adwords or affiliate marketing companies.
Just a few thoughts off the top of my head.
.-= Herb Everett´s last blog ..PowerPoint: Good vs. Evil, Part 1 =-.
I personally wouldn’t pay for extra benefits, but I think your suggestion is still the most logical way to go. If even a small fraction of the 24 million or so people on Twitter were willing to put out a few dollars it could translate into a good chunk of change.
.-= Kitsimpson´s last blog ..How would you edit this? =-.
Why not follow the pattern where personal use is free, but corporate use is not. Companies use it as a form of advertising (direct or indirect), and they have to pay for that elsewhere, so it seems consistent. Twitter could then put together addl feeds/reports/mailing lists for more income from those customers.
I think one important thing is that it is very unlikely that Twitter as we know it today is going to be here for too much longer. As a business, they are going to have to start generating some revenue so something has to change.
For Twitter to remain free for users, they will have to start carrying a lot of advertising of one sort or another. This would be a huge turn off for me personally.
The alternative (or maybe as well as) there is the paid subscription model. This would be my choice – I use the service many times each day so I can’t possibly expect them to give it to me for free forever. A paid subscription with no ads plus the list of features you mentioned – especially good spam blocking – would be just fine for me.
Anyone not wishing to contribute is welcome to all the ads and spam!
.-= David´s last blog ..Blog of the Week – SEOMoz =-.
Not only will I not pay, but I’ll be pretty pissed if they offer features to paying members only. They provide a framework, users supply the content. Ideally, they should be paying US. Friendfeed is free and doesn’t have spam. I’ve been using Google for free for years, and see no ads or spam (I use FF/adblock, but doesn’t everyone?) and even if I do, I rarely click through. Perhaps I’m clueless, but I’m not sure how this model continues to stay relevant. I think it will be forced to get with the times and change.
.-= Tal Shafik´s last blog ..Moleskine Knockoff at Office Depot =-.
Tal, I also hate ads and use FF/Adblock – drives me crazy if I get stuck using IE for any reason.. Problem is, if everyone was to do the same as us do you really believe all those nice free services we enjoy from Google would still be there? No chance – either we’d have to pay or Google would be history!
It would be great if everything on-line could be ad/spam free and $$ free. Just not going to happen, I’m afraid.
.-= David´s last blog ..Blog of the Week – SEOMoz =-.
I wouldn’t pay, personally, because I have no need for pro features. However, one thing I wouldn’t like to see is some kind of visible distinction between pay and free members. At just about every site I know that gives some kind of recognition to paying members develops a culture of “pay members are better/more important” pretty quickly. It’s natural, I guess, but really annoying.
While in the theory of your post I would pay for those extra features (and to support the server), way back when I did the same chip-in for Blogger Pro, and the return on investment became more frustrating than just sticking with the free service.
As long as paid or pro content is treated as a special bonus rather than a killer feature the perks will never pay in the long run.
.-= krisis´s last blog ..The Happinomics of Magneto =-.
It’s very much a balancing act, agreed – pro features need to be worth the investment but there needs to be zero impact on those who do not want to pay. As I’ve said elsewhere, this is why any premium add-ons have to be ‘behind the scenes’, and cannot impact the stream in any way.
I think that this is inevitable. Twitter needs to pull in some revenue from somewhere; and I do not think that the users will get a choice. The difficulty will be in defining a premium service that people ‘would’ pay for but retains a free service that people would continue to use. If Twitter upsets the balance to much then they would lose customers rapidly. I think a simple introduction of a premium service is the simplest and easiest way.
.-= David Baldaro´s last blog ..Xerox Ice – a Shining Example of Smart Customer Engagement using XMPie =-.
Yes – as said the key part is maintaining the core functionality of the service, and not ‘upsetting the apple cart’ for the majority of users who won’t pay for extras. The premium service needs to be ‘behind the scenes’ add-ons – such as tweet editing, spam filters and so on – that don’t impact the stream in any way, but radically improve the service for the power-users.
Sounds fair enough. Twitter is very popular – wouldn’t many be sorry to lose it? The hard part might be fixing on the right price. If It’s fairly low, more people should be keen to use Cool Extras. Let’s face it, the more they get, the better the long-term viability.
A survey on “How much is it worth to you?” could be very interesting. You really need to know what your users think on something like this. If it’s really unpopular, an alternative would have to be better. I notice that Wikipedia has been appealing for donations. The wording is nicely done, and seems to have worked.
I would be willing to pay a small monthly amount for a premium account, probsbly up to £5 a month depending on the extra features available.
I initially thought I would never pay for twitter, but the more I use it, the more I can see it’s immense capabilities and I really dont want Twitter to go down the route of sending spinsored tweets i would not be able to avoid; I would find that a real turn off.
I liked the idea of some of the suggested extra features you mentioned; I think that would enhance my experience of using twitter, but still offer a basic service to those who dont want extras.
I couldn’t quite make my mind up about which poll option to choose because I might be inclined to pay for additional services every now and then. I realise that in the proposal you outlined this would be entirely possible, but still, there wasn’t a poll option I felt reflected this.
I did read lately that Twitter are planning on increasing the API count significantly. I agree an edit window would be very useful; however in the meantime, I’ve been using the delete and re-post method on the rare occasions I spot I’ve made a glaring error in a tweet (the rest of the time I must just overlook it!).
I can’t really think of a price I’d be prepared to pay. I’d certainly like to see any pay system work so that the more “air time” you buy, a bigger discount is applied. e.g. £5 pcm paid monthly, £4.75 pcm paid quarterly, £4.50 pcm paid bi-annually and £4 pcm paid annually. Such a model would benefit both the consumer in the long term and the provider in the immediate short term. (This despite my earlier comment of I might use occasionally).
This all said, I feel that as soon as the focus becomes payware, people will pack up shop and go elsewhere. You only have to look at all the irritating Facebook groups people create with regards to, “As soon as Facebook start to charge I’m off” I get invited to on a regular basis and these are purely rumour mill based.
I think I’d pay a small fee out of altruism – to keep it online because I benefit from it. I know other sites whose running costs are funded on that kind of altruism. Have to say it’s not big money though. The Holt Grail of monetisation is still undiscovered.
i would NOT pay1