>Well, you could charge for it. But of course you wouldn't be able to compete with free - you'd have to have competitors who needed to charge too.
Are you sure about that? Twitter's annual revenue is 2.4 billion dollars, and they have 300 million users. $0.55/month per user is all it would take to match their current revenue.
Sure, when a service is getting up off the ground, you can't beat free, but for one that's established, like Facebook or Twitter, the subscription fees can be made miniscule.
As long as the advertising model is used, a set of perverse incentives exist that encourage social platforms to treat advertisers as more important than users, to inflate their user numbers, to lie about views, to tolerate fake accounts and harassment, and to close their APIs.
A $1 premium ad-free option with 50% adoption would increase twitter's revenue and remove the perverse incentives.
And as soon as they do that somebody else will start a free clone to siphon off their users, and people will abandon Twitter. Getting people from $0-$1 is a lot harder than $1-$5. Humans aren't very rational.
For that matter, note that mobile game companies found out it was harder to get all your users to pay $5 for a game than to get 1% of your users to pay hundreds.
This assumes that all Twitter users are actual people and that one person doesn't have multiple accounts all over the place. I would imagine that, although still not a major issue, the cost would be a bit higher for users and that's only factoring in users that find enough utility in Twitter to think that it's worth paying for.
Are you sure about that? Twitter's annual revenue is 2.4 billion dollars, and they have 300 million users. $0.55/month per user is all it would take to match their current revenue.
Sure, when a service is getting up off the ground, you can't beat free, but for one that's established, like Facebook or Twitter, the subscription fees can be made miniscule.
As long as the advertising model is used, a set of perverse incentives exist that encourage social platforms to treat advertisers as more important than users, to inflate their user numbers, to lie about views, to tolerate fake accounts and harassment, and to close their APIs.
A $1 premium ad-free option with 50% adoption would increase twitter's revenue and remove the perverse incentives.