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Comment by jcadam | Hacker News Reader

I've had the same thought. Charge a small monthly fee in lieu of running ads or selling user data. Might cut down on fake/spam accounts as well.

But I don't think it would work (and I'd totally work on something like this if I thought it would). People say they care about privacy, but when you present them with the option of paying $5/mo for a service that respects their privacy or using a "free" service that tracks everything they do and sells that data to anyone who'll pay, they'll almost always opt for the latter.

Now, I would certainly pay a monthly fee for a non-user-hostile social network experience. And I would consider the smaller user base a feature, so long as it wasn't too small.

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$60/year to post about taking the kids to visit Grandma is pretty steep for most users.

Is that a bad thing?

Maybe we should take that as a sign that announcing every trip to visit grandma to the world just isn't a thing we need to be doing.

Then maybe we ought to charge $0.05 per post instead of a flat monthly fee :)

You should have seen what long distance phone calls cost before the 90's (i.e. cellphones).

I made a $100 phone call to a girl I met on vacation in 1990.

Most people will follow others, and if everyone's paying $5 they'll gladly pay it too. It's getting that critical mass of paying users is what's hard. I wonder if it's viable to have government subsidize somehow...

The whole point of a social network is to connect with friends. If it was a paid service, nobody would be on it.

Considering that every other startup has wanted to build "Facebook/MySpace/Twitter BUT FOR XXXX" for the last decade, I guarantee what you want is out there (or has existed at some point), but nobody is on it and nobody has heard of it, because it costs money and nobody is going to pay money for a social network that's empty. I personally wouldn't pay money for a social network that's not empty, either... and I'm sure a lot of people share my sentiment.

Yes, exactly! Also developers still thinking in dollars need to understand the rest of the world seriously! The income levels all around the world are very less in the developing countries. This is a significant factor. If I'm earning only 100$/month I would definitely not pay a cent for a service that promises 'privacy'. I need to survive first and if I'm able to do stuff for free I'm definitely using it. Those people are least bothered about privacy.

An anecdote from a recent experience: I'm in India and there is the Aadhar project which assigns unique id to every citizen. There is a big privacy debate about it in the cities regarding privacy issues as the govt is forcing everyone to link our assets and tax numbers to it. People in the villages have no idea about it and there were pamphlets of Aadhar numbers being used as tissue papers in a local snack shops. But they all have a Facebook account for sure.

People don't understand understand privacy when they just want to survive.

Does FB make $5 a month off the average user? If not, $5 a year? Regardless of what FB makes, could $5 a year keep a FB clone alive at FBs current volume? Would people even pay that?

In 2017 FB made $40B in revenue on 2B users.

So $2 per month per user sounds about right.

App.net failed charging $50 a year. I think they should have tiered or been cheaper. But that’s one datapoint.

FB does tens of billions in revenue on 2.1 or 2.2B users worldwide. Far more than $5 a year. I assume a $10 a year social network could break even or even profit. But how many people will really pay? Especially when you scope out to every type of person from every country FB has a hold on.

I feel 5 dollars is expensive for a monthly. Servers are pretty cheap, storage is pretty cheap. There is no realistic way to pay a few pennies per month though. Maybe 5 dollars yearly. If it's a not for profit then they just need to operate slightly above cost.

I was very happy to pay USD 1 a year for WhatsApp.

I think they were already profitable by te time they sold out.

There's also other monetization options:

API access for businesses.

Premium accounts.

Etc.

And FTR: I'd gladly paid 10 times as much as WhatsApp charged if that was the price- as long as they didn't sell out to my enemies.

The reason Friends Reunited failed (at least here in the UK) was definitely that any payment was too big a barrier. Most people just don't care. They didn't before CA, they don't now.

I use FB as I attend various gatherings that organise there, but I no longer contribute much, and am phasing it out.

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