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Comment by its_so_on | Hacker News Reader

I think facebook should charge 75 cents per month to use it.

This will weed out users who just don't care; it will give more information to advertisers as well.

Oh and what's that? 75 cents per month actually ends up tripling their income! (if they now get $9 per year off the seventy-five cents, plus the same four in ad revenue.)

Anyway if even 75 cents per month is too much, then they can go ahead and make OEM deals etc for a facebook sticker and do like Microsoft did. Or give it away with cans of coke. One in twenty wins a year of facebook.

Or, you know, do what people expect and roll into the price of a cell phone.

Just some thoughts...

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FB's golden goose is that is has the web's largest social audience and therby specific demographic data about everyone. FB shareholders would run screaming for the exits if ever a paid subscription were forced on its users.

FB's achilles heal is exactly this: it's getting boring.

Sorry but terrible idea. Not even 1% of facebook users would stick around. And before you argue that 1% of the current user base would be great, the usefulness of a social network is greatly diminished if your friends aren't there, making eventually even the last 1% leave.

And your objection to the OEM model?

If facebook started charging 75 cents a month to use it, it would be abandoned so fast it would make movement from myspace look glacial. Facebook might as well just convert their users accounts to Google Plus accounts - it would make everything less painful.

I think you're underestimating people. If they do decide to pay up, and then they notice that they haven't really used it in 3 months, they will stop paying even that 75 cents a month. This will lead to a lot more than 20-30% of users quitting over time.

The 30% will start using a Facebook alternative, and then once they're all settled in, they will start poaching everyone else from Facebook, and get them to use this new "cooler" social network. When companies lose their early adopters, it's over. They just don't know it until a few years later when the negative numbers start showing up, and it's too late to fix the problem.

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