Published on March 04, 2010 Will social media start charging for posts? Twitter Japan’s failed experiment..(for now)
Back in November last year, a presentation in Japan by a Twitter partner announced that Twitter planned to start charging followers to read posts for certain “premium” accounts. Just a day later an official press release from Twitter Japan confirmed that this was definitely not the case and that there would not be any charging to read tweets.
The plan was quickly killed, but would it have worked had it gone ahead? And will it come back?
The answer to this question is that the jury is still out.
- on one hand, there would have been a huge backlash from those who believe that social media should stay social
- there would also have been a huge backlash from those in other countries who would probably have mainly been concerned about the possibility that this charging regime would come to other countries.
- But on the other hand, there are many precedents in countries in Asia where people pay per use for the receipt of premium content. At the dawn of mobile phones did people think that people would pay to receive text messages from businesses?
Things that could work for the receipt of premium content could include the following:
- People receiving celebrity hot gossip tweets straight away from top celebrities. How much would celebrity watchers and paparazzi pay to be directly connected? They can currently subscribe to this information for free but if charging was introduced would they not pay for it and risk someone else getting that information before them?
- Vehicles that rely on “instant messages” that have previously been serviced by SMS messaging – for example, server down messages, flight delay services, stock information etc.
We’ll have to wait and see what this all means for our online future and whether there is a new business market opening up.
No Comments