No one ever wants to pay anything for something they've been getting all along for free (hence the hokey old admonition about cows, milk and sex before marriage.)
So it should come as no surprise that 72% of respondents in a just-released survey by Parks Associates contend they would abandon their favorite social networking site altogether before paying a measly two bucks a month. The surprise is that almost 28% claim they would be willing to pony up.
But what people profess in polls and what they do in the privacy of their own Web browsers are not necessarily one and the same.
As predictable as that 72% may be, it says here that a bunch of those folks are not being truthful with themselves, the firm doing the poll, or both, because if MySpace started charging $2 a month tomorrow there is no way in this or Second Life that three out of four MySpacers would just drop their precious pages and their friends like fifth-period French.
Like, uh, no way.
There would be caterwauling and a meaningful number of defections, but I'm thinking it's more likely that three out four would pay to stay than three out of four would walk.
Two bucks a month? Heck, even to teen-agers that's chump change these days.
Of course, the difficulty both with such surveys and disputing their conclusions is that there is really no way to settle the argument short of one of these sites actually asking for $2 a month. That's unlikely.
From the press release: "These findings present a challenge to the companies competing in the social networking space. Parks Associates found 80% of broadband users ages 18-25 use these sites on a monthly basis; however, monetizing these users is proving to be difficult, with even category leaders such as MySpace struggling to turn big profits."
Go ahead, MySpace, call their bluff (it's not my money).
When not blogging, I am a Network World news editor and write the 'Net Buzz column.
The opinions expressed in this Weblog are those of the writer and may not represent the opinions of Network World.
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Most Social Networks Will Fail
Paul: I couldn't agree more. People aren't willing to pay for social networks.
Our company has developed several social networks. And frankly, about half have failed. The networks require a real core issue/topic that attracts members.
Employee alumni sites are one prime example. We developed alumni sites for former employees of CMP, Ziff Davis and IDG.
CMP and Ziff, in particular, have a lot of former employees who are looking to reconnect with one another. The sites helped us learn about Ning, a free social network platform from Marc Andreessen. (Here's some background about our social network experiments). The sites have more than 1,000 total members, but only 10 percent are active and only about 1 to 3 percent of members are really active.
That seems to be the case with most of the social networks I've seen. But paid social networks? No way, no how. I just don't see it happening.
-jp
This is already playing out at Yahoo
Yahoo Photos recently shuttered its free service. They hoped to herd everyone over to Flickr, the social-photo-networking site that happens to charge about $2 a month (they have a free version, but it's severely limited compared to what Yahoo Photos offered for same lack of moola.) There has indeed been much sturm and drang over the concept of charging for a service, coming from people accustomed to free.
How it plays out, and how many ex-Yahoo Photos people actually end up paying? dunno. Might make for an interesting follow-up to this piece.