Would You Pay For Twitter? [OPINION]

Twitter is a really important part of my life. That may sound a little overblown or even a bit sad, however it’s true. It has helped my career massively and The Social Penguin Blog would struggle to exist without the traffic and interaction it creates. I’ve been thinking recently if I would pay to use Twitter and I am pretty sure that I would, especially if the future of the platform depended on it. It got me thinking, can services like Twitter stay free forever?

The Simplest Form of Monetisation

Twitter has, and is struggling to make money. Its ad model is far from perfect and isn’t even obtainable to the majority of businesses due to the expensive nature of the ads (options for smaller businesses are coming). Aside from the cost of products such as promoted trends, there is little evidence of any real ROI. So what if the ad model never really takes off and Twitter decide to start asking users to pay? Not a huge amount of money, but a few pounds/dollars etc a month? After all, paying for products and services is hardly an alien concept to us humans, right? It’s the most obvious way for a service like Twitter to make money and survive.

If they did take that step, what would they need to do justify that?

Really clamp down on the huge amounts of spam
Offer an ad-free option for those who pay
Ensure that it is so robust that it never goes down (although the ‘fail whale‘ is rare these days)
Be 110% committed to a truly excellent user experience

If the future of Twitter depended on paid subscriptions, would people pay? I asked Twitter:

@Tambourinos - ‘negative, however I do think most of the internet will cease to be free in the near future’

@ginandting - ‘Yes, but I’d want some added value for that (no ads, more features, etc)’

@_NatStar - ‘I wouldn’t want to on principle. But could I live without it? Probably not. So I’d be likely to give in’

@Calzo - ‘Nope. It would turn into a bunch of companies trying to sell their products to each other. There would be no customers’

@UKHaiku – ‘Yes, if it was instead of any advertising or non-anonymised use of my data. I also reserve the right to my choice of client’

@btocher – ‘We’re already subjected to adverts on some Twitter clients, so I’d be very reluctant indeed’

@jackiecameron1 – ‘so far I have not paid for any social networking so I can’t imagine why that would change’

@craigmcgill – ‘Yes. But wouldn’t pay for Facebook’

@theFullSouter – ‘Absolutely! Twitter is my jam. I only use Facebook because friends and family do. I tried to hold out but caved’

A real mix of opinion there, interesting that people would pay for Twitter use over Facebook. This post has had real value added to it by those quotes, thanks to those who submitted feedback.

So, over to you folks, does Twitter offer you enough value to validate paying for the service? If it was a live or die situation for Twitter would you pay to help it survive? If Twitter allowed donations, ala Wikipedia, would you throw them a payment from time to time? Please do tell us your thoughts in the comments section below…

Mike McGrail

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http://www.linkedin.com/in/annelizhannan Anneliz Hannan

No, not at this point.
http://www.facebook.com/edward.harkins.7 Edward Harkins

I’d suppose that the issue here would be what is it that Twitter wanted to be – whilst avoiding Peter Porter’s dreaded ‘Stuck in the Middle Trap’.

What the ROI is or can be is a mute point and that’s a Big Adventure of Discovery that Facebook has embarked upon. It’s interesting in that regard, what Martin Sorrell argued in the recent (very good) BBC documentary on Facebook. His strongly argued opinion is that Facebook never will be a ‘commercial’ business and he argues that we do not really know what, if any, profit is made out of it for its funders and investors.

Is the great mass of ‘social’ tweeting and the tweets of the chattering class essential to Twitter’s viability? If so, I hae ma doots about whether, or how much, people in those segments would pay for Twitter.

On the other hand there seem to be a great many, but unquantified, traders of various sorts and scale that do seem to derive business from Twitter activity. I can see that at first it may appear that they will readily pay; but would that be true if they detected a dramatic falling off in the social and chattering classes traffic? Facebook is maybe, again, instructive; I have heard at two separate recent business events from smaller companies who are no longer willing to meet Facebook’s charges.

Finally to return to Martin Sorrell, his other greatly urged need for caution was on the need for the operator to retain integrity and trust as it ventures further down the commercial route – something else that Facebook is now struggling on?

http://www.thesocialpenguinblog.com Mike McGrail

Hi Edward,

Great comment, thanks for that. If charges were introduced I agree that the chattering users would potentially tail off. I think there would have to be a scaled payment model, one the reflects the different grade of users.

http://twitter.com/canhoto Ana Isabel Canhoto

While I understand the intellectual principle of paying for a service that you value, I worry that many people would not adhere to Twitter if they had to pay for it – because they can not afford it, because it’s difficult to see the value of Twitter until you have joined it and have built a network (at least a small one), or because they oppose paying for SN… whatever. Hence, paying reduces serendipity and ubiquity, which, in my view, are Twitter’s main benefits for its users.

Plus… i doubt that Twitter would have been used (or have had the same effect) as a key means of communication in Egypt’s events, the London riots, etc.

http://www.thesocialpenguinblog.com Mike McGrail

Hi Ana,

I agree that people may stay away if it was paid for, I like your point on needing to have a network in order to see value, however a lot of people use it as a news source etc. I would imagine there would have to be a free option for it to continue to grow anway.

socialshout

Hey Mike!

Just saw this on Twitter and thought to myself, ‘What a great question!’.

Had you asked me this when I first starting using it a couple of years ago, I would’ve said no. I didn’t understand the value of it – like many still don’t.

The good ol’ 30/60/90 day trial of a Freemium model wouldn’t work either coz, to Ana’s point, it takes time to build your value within it.

Now, if they were to enhance some of the Group, Search & List features so that some of that stuff could come to you essentially pre-populated, based on checking a few interest boxes, this could help avoid the early abandonment issues.

I too use Twitter as a great news source for topics not generally considered newsworthy. BUT…would I really miss it if it wasn’t there or would I just find another way to get the same info? Flipboard & Zite come to mind as new age content curation tools that could give me much of the same.

I think I’d want some cleaner functionality if I was paying for Twitter. As an example, when I search for a topic of interest, I get posts in all different languages. Annoying!

I should add that I have made a few good business connections via Twitter that I would probably not have been able to make without it. There is definitely some real value there – somewhere amongst all the noise.

If there was a Twitter for the masses for free and a Twitter for business that harnessed some of those key features & functionality, I think I and many others would gladly pay.

I’m thinking Linkedin for Twitter (or vice versa)

Having said that, I value Linkedin but don’t pay for it either. Hmmm??

Great discussion. Thanks for starting it!

Trent!

http://www.thesocialpenguinblog.com Mike McGrail

Hi Trent thanks for the great and thoughtful comment. I have made some amazing connections on Twitter that have been really valuable to my career, if that continued to the case, I’d be more than happy to pay. Like you say that functionality that a paid option would open up would have to be very attractive. Overall, the UX on Twitter is far from perfect. If there was no free version, the celeb stalkers etc would run for the hills I think.