Facebook Groups May Soon Charge Monthly Subscription Fees For Access (theverge.com)

Facebook announced today in a blog post that group administrators can start charging $4.99 to $29.99 a month for exclusive membership in certain groups. "Parenting, cooking, and home cleaning groups will be the first ones to get the new feature as part of an early test," reports The Verge. From the report: As it stands now, free groups will remain intact, but they will soon have the option to launch premium sub-groups. For instance, lifestyle blogger Sarah Mueller's Declutter My Home group is starting an Organize My Home group that costs $14.99 a month to join. And the Grown and Flown Parents group is making a College Admissions group that charges $29.99 for access to college counselors. Facebook says the new feature is so that group admins, who put a lot of time and dedication to growing their communities, can also earn money at the same time. The company also says admins could take the money they earn to create higher-quality content for the group as well, whether that be more posts, videos, or offline meet-ups and events. Facebook reportedly won't be getting a cut of the subscription fees.

Comments

Let me get this straight:

[Rick Schumann]

You people are having all your very personal data scraped, surveiled, logged, analyzed, categorized, profiled, and sold to whoever can pay Zuckerberg for it, and on top of that you're going to pay for access to parts of Facebook?

My sides, they're exploding, I'm laughing so hard!

I seriously hope you guys don't do this.

My new hobby:

[Anonymous Coward]

* Get a Facebook account purely for 'business' purposes
* Start some shitty 'group' for something lame and lulzy to attract trolls
* Group fills up with trolls and their natural prey
* Start charging $29.99 a month to be in the group
* Trolls paying to troll, troll-prey paying to be troll-prey
* INFINITE MONEYS xD xD xD

Re:My new hobby:

[Lab Rat Jason]

I wish there were mod points for "Troll, but in a good way +1"

Dumb people

[DogDude]

We've had newsgroups and email lists that have been 100% free since the start of the Internet. 25ish years later, people are PAYING for these same services, AND are giving the service 100% of their personal data. Wow. You've come a long way, baby!

cable TV promise. 'no commercials' not true

[Joe_Dragon]

Cable tv started as way to pick up OTA TV in areas where they where hard to get. Then super stations showed up with AD's. HBO was and still is ad free.

Cable networks back in the day had ad's

CaptainDork as CaptainObvious ...

[CaptainDork]

... sees this for what it is:

People who pay for content are verified consumers of whatever the fuck is related to the special interest group.

Zuck gonna tell advertisers, "I got a group of suckers, and the price of poker is going up!"

Re:What are these groups like?

[fafalone]

Most of them are like that yes; but you're going to find that same situation on any service where the creators of the community control the moderation. On any politically charged issue, or topic prone to groupthink, forget about it. But groups for non-political things have some value. My hometowns Facebook group is very useful for finding out about and discussing local events. It was especially great during Sandy; by far the most current and detailed news about what was going on, what was open, where the trucks with power outlets were, etc. Then there's my other group connecting the few people playing an old game. Back in college, the groups for student orgs, events, etc, were also of great value.
Actually, that's a trend. Local groups are generally ok, groups about something highly esoteric are sometimes ok depending on topic, but general interest, highly populated groups are generally shit. Political groups are just like r/The_Donald and /pol/, some of the most deranged morons on the internet.

Re:What are these groups like?

[datavirtue]

It is a mess actually. The moderators on your typical facebook group are not up to the task. In addition, if someone posts something controversial and you take offense, the mods or group owner will ban you immediately to prevent you from complaining. I was in a group for a year or two and I jokingly took offense at a "african boy meme" that someone posted (I forget what the words were). The group owner immediately banned me so that it would be hard for me to complain. I no longer had access to the group or my comments or the comments of others. If I was really upset and wanted to complain to facebook I would have had to contact facebook manually and tried to guide them through the group postings to find the offensive post. If someone does complain about something successfully...your group will most likely be shut down immediately. Saw that happen a few times. I no longer find any value in FB groups. They have taken the basic principles of internet forums and systematically destroyed them on their platform.