Scrawled in Wax

While Twitter is by many standards a runaway success, the one minor problem the service seems to have is, um, the seeming lack of a business plan. Today, Dan Farber of CNET (err, CBS|Net?) proposed a rather radical solution to this issue when he suggested that people should pay for Twitter. And while it sounds like I am being snarky, I am in fact not. Quite to the contrary, the concept that all users should pay for a service goes against the dominant idea that ‘free is better’, one espoused by many of the ‘weborati’ including Chris Anderson and Kevin Kelly. And while it is common to have a paid premium service that offers additional features such as on Pownce or Flickr, as Farber notes, ‘free’ has become the startup model for at least developing a user-base.

There are practical reasons to admire Farber’s suggestion. First, as a paying customer, one could expect to have some recourse for the numerous outages and errors one currently experiences using Twitter; secondly, having a pay barrier does a lot to ensure a committed, active user-base - and indeed, many argue that this is why the level of discussion on metafilter (which requires a $5 signup fee) has never descended into the kind of stupidity you see on free sites like YouTube.

But another reason to at least consider a pay model for Twitter is that it places more choice in the hands of its users. Social networks are ostensibly about connecting with other people. In an ad-supported service such as Facebook, you pay for the platform and service through viewing ads. This model limits the choice you have as a consumer because you cannot determine where ‘your money’ goes. Instead, if you come upon an advert by a company you are ethically opposed to or learn that the company is funded (or funds) other companies or causes you disagree with, you have little choice but to continue using the service or to simply delete your account. But while this is a choice of sorts, your friends are using the service as are perhaps your business contacts and you, understandably, want to be there too. By basing the economics of a site on advertising, my capacity to ‘vote with my dollars’ is lessened considerably as I cannot actively choose what I support but, rather, have only two passive options available to me: support through viewing ads or not using the service at all.

Conversely, by paying a small user-fee, I actively support what I want to i.e. Twitter and the community I’ve developed there. That is not to say that the almost-coercive aspect of social networking disappears - i.e. when you don’t support a company’s politics or affiliations but you want to be in on what your friends are doing - but it is, in my opinion, a better option as it is creates a one-to-one relationship between a paying user and the company that provides the service. If you don’t like the service or the company, rather than quitting or begrudgingly using it , you don’t sign up in the first place. In contrast, in the ad-supported model, your only option in making sure that ‘your dollars’ are doing what you want them to is to keep daily track of what ads are being served and by whom - which isn’t really an option at all. None of which is to say that I actually want to pay for Twitter. And I’ll admit that the difference is quite small. But all individual’s actions in the face of large, well-funded companies are just that - small. If the only options available to me are viewing ads from oil companies who lobby against climate change legislation, or cosmetics manufacturers who work hard on making people feel bad about themselves - well then, I’d rather cough up $5 a month and at least know where my money is going.