Guy Kawasaki posted a poll on via his SocialToo service that asks “How much would you pay to use Twitter?”
More than half (around 53%) of respondents, presumably all Twitter users who follow Guy, said they’d pay at least $5/month. The last thing I want is for Twitter to start charging, so I want each of you to take that poll and say “$0, I’d rather see it go away.”
I doubt they would start charging. At least, not if they want new people to keep signing up.
Great poll (I took it) expect that “$0, I’d rather see it go away” could skew answers towards $5. I wouldn’t pay, but I don’t want to see it go away.
Unless you receive extra features, like to be able to follow more people or send files through direct message or something.
agree. as i twittered guy here: http://twitter....atus/1013330905 the wording (or selection is options, if you like) (not to mention the fact that the population is both a non-neutral subgroup and self-selected) destroys the value of this survey as far as i’m concerned.
Where is the $1 a month option? I’d pay an annual premium if they reopened IM…
Saying you’re willing to pay vs actually paying are two very different outcomes. Somehow I think people would have a change of heart when it came time to type in their 16 digits.
Don is exactly right – we seem to be optimistic about what we will pay for when asked or interviewed. I have seen this countless times. Cut the $5 response rate at least in half.
When we define new products with customers we have to use a number of tests and techniques to get true predictive insight on the minimal product features/functionality they will actually buy.
great point, totally agreed!
I second that, this is misleading, and not likely to be reality when it comes to taking out our wallets.
How quickly would someone clone Twitter and offer it for free, whilst maybe also being a little innovative with new ways to make money the Freemium way?
If the basic service remains free but paying gets you something like more API calls, maybe some extra features, I would gladly pay.
would those who pay, still want to pay once they lose half of their followers (the ones that won’t be paying)?
Good question, since the value is in the number of followers. I’d pay for a little more value. Not less…
I think twitter has other options than to charge average users. Why not build out networks on special interests and charge for those? Where there’s a network of devoted users there’s some sort of value. The problem is you can’t make (present) freebies cost something.
$5/annually maybe. Monthly? no way. They’d never charge though- there are dozens if not hundreds of next-in-line services that would instantly take over.
This is a deceptive headline.
It should say that more than half of Twitter users who ALSO frequent Guy Kawasaki’s “Social Too” service (whatever that is) would pay.
There’s a big difference. My guess is half of Twitter users are dormant people who have abandoned accounts and spammers.
No, worse – more than half of Twitter users who frequent Kawasaki’s service AND bothered to respond to the poll SAY they would pay.
I think speculative (woul you?) polls like this are almost worthless, except in this case to generate sensationalized headlines by someone who wants you to click through and skew the poll … shame on you, Arrington.
I ran a poll here on this after TechCrunch looked at some of the Twitter stats back in April. 42% of people that took part said they’d pay £12/$24 a year to use Twitter. I’m a firm believer in Twitter just asking its community what they would pay and from this and the straw poll I did – I reckon all the signs are good for a Twitter that perople pay for to keep ad-free and stable. All we need now is SMS back in the UK!
start charging $ = slow or stunt twitter’s growth = flat-lined ad revenue = slow death/marginalization of twitter.
the free model works! myself and countless others would never have starting using it if it weren’t free.
Just thinking out loud here, but I wonder if half the community left, if those that currently are willing to pay for the service would subsequently change their mind because the service/community is no longer as useful to them… crap. I just saw that ed already wrote this exact same thing (above)…
Wow. Have we really come full circle on this? It was not so long ago that we were celebrating free software, free service, free anything and pushing the notion that free was better for all of us. But wait, companies find it hard to stay in business if they give their services away for free.
Now, Facebook and Twitter are quickly scrambling to find sustainable revenue, and we’re even polling users to determine if they’ll let us charge them for services that they’re already accustomed to using for free.
And it’s interesting that we’re now BEGGING Twitter to make some money because, let’s face it, the immediate future of free web apps depends largely on the ability of Twitter and companies like it to show that free does work. But what if it doesn’t?
After initially doubting Twitter, I’ve gotten used to it and would like to support it staying alive and growing. That said, it’s hard to monetize a service that used to be free, and has free alternatives. What Twitter has going for it is an expanding developer ecosystem, a significant user base, and market share – all very good things. But moving to a paid model might see the kind of user evaporation Apple saw when they started to charge for .Mac when it started out free.
Of note, I believe Guy is a part-owner of SocialToo, not the full owner, as it is Jesse Stay’s product.
Would I pay for Twitter? NEVER! {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/hQ8P89wpyW_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Would I pay for Twitter? NEVER! ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/wT3FXjFYGp”}}}
You are probably a sefl-promoter, so good riddance. Anyone that is responsible for over 1000 SMS messages per day should have to pay.
Only freaking clueless Twitter users would pay $5/month. If this happens, the most interesting part of Twitter will disappear, i.e., most of Twitter users that report breaking news from all over the world, and leave the rest of you paying morons to talk with each other.
With only 50% ready to pay right now in hypothetical situation, I would expect only 15% to actually pay up if at all it becomes reality. Which essentially means loosing most of your followers. Rest are generally on the chat already so why to pay ???
Louis is right – SocialToo.com is only part Guy’s product. Guy is co-founder with me. Thanks for sharing though!
Rather a business model could be professional twitters can be asked to pay fees say 1000 USD (who have more than x number of followers) and then these ppl shuld be allowed to ask people fees like 10 USD per year to follow them. even if i consider there are such 100 people who ll sign up for professional accounts then also it becomes 100K revenue per year. plus some income source to ppl like Guy kawasaki
People do love free, but usually they do not mind paying for something if it provides value to them. for example, from the getgo europeans told them to set up a micropayment system for DMs as they will never ever make a deal with the mobile phone providers here as they did in the US – we dont pay for receiving sms.
But we would like to be able to send some DM to the mobile phone and probably pay for it.
I would pay to be able to host a ‘corporate twitter’ in a way that standard twitter tools could work with it, as I do not want to set up my own.
And I would pay a certain amount of money just like I do with flickr for additional features. Like keeping an archive accessible etc.
I am sure enterprises would pay to ensure a stability when sending out tweets and would especially pay for data from their tweets, like amounts of klicked links or visits to the twitter site.
Which btw is what any statistics nut would pay for too even if they are not a company.
So, there are many ways there would be money in it for them – if they would just pick it up.
I’d prefer they charge so they have a sustainable business model.
/non twitter-er
This poll is stupid. The “$0″ option sounds like it’s for people who hate twitter.
$5/month for twitter sounds about right!! here’s another alternative to keeping in touch with colleagues:
http://www.vingtalk.com/cpp
group voice and text messages for your friends!
Can you say “selection bias?”
Paywalls are an inevitable outcome for the internet unless disruption and chaos ends in the advertising business, which doesn’t appear likely to happen any time soon. I think it’s a mistake to see the web as something that can provide rich, well-made/maintained and useful content and services free of charge, given that these things cost money to produce, maintain, etc. I think the alternative is a mainly automated process and I’m not sure that’s necessarily the right route to take. Not just because it’ll mean a loss of jobs, but also, I’m not sure it’ll be a really great experience. On every other communications and entertainment platform, people pay a fee – cell phone, landline, movies, etc. I don’t think it’s unrealistic to expect the web to be the same, or audacious to push for it. Unless we all really start working within the ad industry to fix what’s broken over there, end the nonsensical, fragmented approach people are pushing companies to take on the web, and make a concentrated effort to truly find monetization solutions for companies because they need them, we’re either going to see a bad experience or have to start paying for some of it.
As it stands today, free. Add new features, groups, SMS, MSN or whatever and have a pro plan for $35 a year.
When you poll, you should ask random people. Don’t let people answer the poll as they wish. Instead of getting an entire population, you are just getting a population of people who answers to polls and are SocialToo users. This is like doing a presidential poll in steakhouses in Texas only. Slightly skewed.
@Mogilny, i think it’s very reasonable to assume its intended to be an informal poll.
Yes. Informal polls lead to bad decisions.
Is there any point to this speculation? Twitter aint going to charge directly like this. full stop. It would only lend themselves to getting squashed by a free option with a more creative way of monetisation.
BTW – i wouldn’t pay to USE the service. I would however pay to not be subjected to advertising. And I would also pay to have targetted marketing go out via twitter. Seems like the only sensible approach in my opinion. As per Michael’s comment above – PRO option makes more sense.
This survey is a complete joke. Thankfully there are enough smart people to point out the reasons why above.
Twitter needs to get real. Money is only made in a few ways on the internet and all are tied to some perception of value. No need to re-invent the wheel. Just show relevant advertisements with each twit.
Will that be enough to pay the bills? Probably not.
That’s a tough spot…charge to stay in business, but instantly loose significant users to other free services, which simultaneously makes it less attractive to be using Twitter at all, let alone paying for it.
Trouble is, the barrier to entry is so low that another service will always be available to make a run at the free model for a period of time.
I’ll boil it down for you: There will be a freemium model for both individuals and businesses. Basic service will continue to be free, but an entirely new suite of functionality & features will be available that will be priced out on a ala carte basis and/or packaged basis.
It’s clear that Twitter is a valuable new communication channel for both individuals and business users Over time Twitter will be releasing new functionality that will only increase it’s usefulness to both groups. Using a baseball analogy, we’re only in the first inning of this game.
A final note; the sample set and structure of the available options in the Kawasaki survey are flawed in ways that make the results nearly useless for the purposes of evaluating user’s willingness to pay for some version of Twitter.
People may technically be willing to pay, if the money would magically float itself from wallets everywhere into the Twitter bank account, but an awful lot of people who think they may pay would never end up typing in their credit card information or logging into PayPal. Especially monthly. Maybe the poll should have asked how many people would take the time to sign up for automatic billing.
Sigh.
LOL. Don’t be so serious, it is just a series of tubes. Take your dog for a walk and chill.
I very much doubt twitter will start charging for the service as we know it. Its apparent to me that twitter will refocus the search.twitter.com site as a current news site and serve ads (either google etc or their own) as their main source of revenue.
Search.twitter.com is a very useful tool and could be great.
they are all lying and i wish twitter would test them on it
I have been using twitter for a few months now and I enjoy it. However, the second they start charging for it I will cancel my account. Sorry, no way in hell is it worth spending a dime on per month.
They should charge for every tweet, just like text messaging. That way people would stop and think before wasting their friends and colleagues’ time with the useless minutiae of their lives.
This survey is bad news for Twitter. It’s a self selected group of highly motivated twitter users, and the best they could do is get 50% to say they’d pay $5/month. Do the math, the company isn’t viable at that level.
to me it seems fairly easy to copy twitter so it’ll be like a suicide action to charge users – unless everyone else charges.
How dare a company ask you to pay them for the service they provide.
I’m continually amused by the poor circular logic implied by all the people who insist that because Twitter is (theoretically) easy to copy, if Twitter charges then they’ll just move over to the platform that doesn’t charge.
But if Twitter isn’t able to eventually monetize it’s platform then it’s unlikely that a competitor will either. So how will the new “free” Twitter alternative survive in the long run?
C’mon people, use your heads.
With an estimated 1 million users, 600 users is not statistically significant.
Also, since the answer of “would rather see it go away” is included, it’s heavily biasing people.
Incidentally, since this post went live, the balance is now skewing 2:1 AGAINST paying for it.
We’re betting that users would rather see a few ads here of there, rather then having to fork out a bunch of cash. Expecting for the average person to pay for twitter, is like asking people to pay for email. It’s just not a viable idea in the age of gmail and other free services.
Jeremy, it would only be statistically significant if you had a better knowledge of the users on twitter and thus of the responders. I don’t really get the poll thing for Twitter, how hard is it to just ask the question rather than relying on an external application to do it.
On the other hand I found this link (http://socialto.../survey/view/19) and as an integrated service on Facebook or FriendFeed it has far more merit.
Why is implementing an advertisement model the same as selling your soul to the devil? Id rather see viagra ads then pay 5 bucks!
Oh btw
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New Jobs. AiLive. Ning.com. Blizzard. AdMob.
They should build Twitter for enterprise where the company downloads (by paying) for the service and hosting it on their servers.
In my opinion, that is the way forward for Twitter and competitors.
Pay? To send tweets? Yeah, right. Anyone who would pay for that seriously needs to consider getting a life…
horribly written survey as many have mentioned no option for <$5 a month. Bad research leading to bad results. Re run the survey the same but with a <$5 a month option. You will have much different results, and a much richer result set.
Its a simple microblogging tool that caught the attention of people and business at the right time. Its not complex, it just requires a large server capacity (and even without, people still use it).
I hope they do start charging so I can create a similar service for free. Why wouldn’t users start using my free service over Twitter?
I don’t think most people would pay to use Google, let alone Twitter. Net ppl have a sense of entitlement that says hey I paid for my computer and my monthly connection so the rest of the web is free. As long as there are people willing to work for free out there, who’s going to be the first to charge?