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Comment by jivatmanx | Hacker News Reader

At some point, there will be a paid social network with significant membership.

This is likely to occur after some particularly egregious and underhanded sale/use of user data by Facebook.

It's likely to be more popular among older professionals, who care more about their reputation because of their career, and don't care about paying a minimal fee.

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That would be kind of cool, actually. A $5 one-time fee for every user. It would keep out the riff-raff and spammers, and there would be no need to sell user content or even have ads at all.

A 5$ one-time fee is way too low. Advertisers will probably outspend anything that isn't a proper monthly subscription.

Isn't that approximately what Facebook makes per user, per year in advertising?

That must be the profit margin. $5 isn't enough to cover costs and living I think.

$5 per user is equal to $5,000,000,000 for revenue and I think Facebook made $1,000,000,000 net profit last year, so Facebook makes about $4.5 per person gross and about $1 per person profit at the moment.

Facebook's North-American ARPU for the 2nd quarter was $3.20 (http://seekingalpha.com/article/756141-facebook-why-shares-a...).

My main point was that a 5$ ONE TIME charge is way too low. Typically ARPU is calculated over a certain period of time (monthly, quarterly, yearly).

That may be a bit low. Facebook makes approximately $5/year off of each user.

Another problem with a $5 one-time fees is that people expect to use your service in perpetuity. That price point probably isn't sustainable over a more than a few year period.

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