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Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone To Facebook: Start a Premium Subscription Service
An anonymous reader writes "Twitter co-founder Biz Stone today decided to offer some business advice for Facebook: launch a premium subscription service. For $10 a month, Stone figures the company could get rid of ads on its site for those willing to pay to go 'premium.' He says in part: ' Anywhoo, now that I’m using it and thinking about it, I’ve got an idea for Facebook. They could offer Facebook Premium. For $10 a month, people who really love Facebook (and can afford it), could see no ads. Maybe some special features too. If 10% percent of Facebook signed up, that’s $1B a month in revenue. Not too shabby. It’s a different type of company, but by way of validation, have a look at Pandora’s 1Q14 financial results. Of all Pandora’s revenue generators, the highest growth year-over-year by far (114% growth rate) is in subscriptions—people paying a monthly fee for an ad-free experience....."
Think how valuable that list would be. The world's uberchumps.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Anywhoo, now that I’m using it and thinking about it, I’ve got an idea for Facebook. They could offer Facebook Premium. For $10 a month, people who really love Facebook (and can afford it), could see no ads. Maybe some special features too. If 10% percent of Facebook signed up, that’s $1B a month in revenue. Not too shabby.
The problem is highlighted in bold. People who love Facebook and are willing to pay $10 a month isn't 10% of Facebook's user base, it probably isn't even 1%. I think hardly anyone really "loves Facebook" at all actually, the only reason people stick around is because that's where their friends are.
Facebook really needs to improve their platform *a lot* if they want to charge people money for it, because in it's current state, it isn't worth a dime.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
you don't notice the feed spam ads? the ones where FB makes it look like your friend posted about a company when they really just "liked" their page 7 or 10 months ago?
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
for Facebook is IF not only would the experience be AD free, but I would have 100% control and ownership of the material that I posted. If I decide to delete/remove something, it would be 100% gone, not archived anywhere. If I want to backup my posts, my entire account, I would be able to do so.
Adblock + gets rid of the overt adverts, and FBPurity (http://www.fbpurity.com/) gets rid of the spammy content (game requests, 'questions', 'trending articles', 'promoted posts') and cleans up the UI cruft (news ticker, half the left column).
With those two, and manually turning on the see all posts option for every page, FB doesn't have much left to charge for that you can't get for free.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
10$ a month to have total anonymity to the government. pay 10$ a month and the government cant access your facebook... EVERYONE would buy that
I'd pay for a subscription if it gave me access to, and the ability to delete, any information they have that references me.