I can tell you the easy answer to that problem: micropayments.
Look how much people will spend on Android apps when they're a dollar or three. Make things really cheap, and people will buy them: they'll do a lot of impulse purchases when things are cheap enough.
If news articles only showed you part of the article, and then demanded $0.02 to read the rest, I could see a lot of people paying that. Considering how little they get paid for ad impressions (fractions of a cent), direct payments like that would be more profitable, and readers wouldn't care that much about spending pocket change on it.
But there's no way to make a functioning micropayment system currently. It's not feasible to have credit-card payments for sub-$1 transactions because of the high per-transaction fees, and Visa/MC have a cartel going where you have to use them for any kind of credit/debit payments.
SV needs to figure out how to make easy, low-fee micropayments a reality, and then we'll see some change.
I would gladly pay a premium if they'd add some fricking features to Twitter and TweetDeck, and I bet I'm not the only one. Just one example, I'd like in TweetDeck to have more visualization options, as well as powerful filtering capability. I get a tweet about every 30 seconds and I would like to have the capability to have some of those go into a "must read later" bucket. That would take a good developer 2 to 8 weeks, lots of people would use it and love it and likely be happy to pay for it, Twitter has all sorts of developers and money, but how often do they release features that are useful? Instead we get some sort of "important" (according to their algorithm if I'm not mistaken) tweets abomination.
Hey I'm not saying these are necessarily awesome ideas, but if your ship is showing signs of starting to sink, doing crazy things like adding features to your product may not be all that crazy.
Any intermediary will face the issue of having user deposit an advance payment so micropayments can happen.
Unless one has balls enough to factor in debt in micropayments. You sign up users and make them agree to pay those .02 at a later time and when you're down five dollars the usets need to pay to continue. It's risky but with enough margin to cover the insolvents it could work
No, it's not. Tech companies are values for growth, and while it's applicability is different to different companies, Facebook is still valued for growth.
This logic says a company in beta valued at $1 mil is worth $100k / user for the 10 beta testers. Not at all.
I mean, linkedin has a legit monetisation strategy just as a socially connected CV platform for recruiters to find people - and charging recruiters for tools to use it effectively.
That seems far far stronger than what I know of twitter. Facebook - well what I really want to know is more detailed metrics like median time spent on it per user, interactions per user, etc etc. I'd be fascinated to know if the trends are downwards.
Agreed. Facebook's entire monetization strategy seems to be just showing ads to people who waste their time there looking at stupid videos and posting stupid comments to them. That's pretty easily defeated with an ad-blocker.
LinkedIn's strategy is, as you said, a socially-connected CV platform so that recruiters can find people and hook them up with jobs, and make a big commission in the process, so LinkedIn charges recruiters a hefty fee for access to people. Ad-blockers aren't going to have any effect here: the recruiters still have to pay to send messages to people. It seems like a much more sound business strategy, as long as professionals still need jobs and there's recruiters looking to place them in jobs. It might not have the mass appeal of the inanity of Facebook or Twitter (since only a fraction of the population is of the demographic that would find it worthwhile to use LinkedIn; someone working as a barista or a Walmart cashier would not), but it certainly isn't subject to the same fickleness that those two are. All it'll take is some other inane social media platform to rise up for people to share dumb videos on and for FB/Twitter to do something dumb to piss off people, and suddenly they could become the next MySpace. LinkedIn's position is much stronger, as long as they don't screw it up trying to achieve the popularity of those other two.
And who are the assholes who down-modded me anyway? There's nothing controversial or offensive here. People have been wanting micropayments for many, many years now on the internet for the exact reasons I states above. Are there some Visa/MasterCard shills here or something?
Look how much people will spend on Android apps when they're a dollar or three. Make things really cheap, and people will buy them: they'll do a lot of impulse purchases when things are cheap enough.
If news articles only showed you part of the article, and then demanded $0.02 to read the rest, I could see a lot of people paying that. Considering how little they get paid for ad impressions (fractions of a cent), direct payments like that would be more profitable, and readers wouldn't care that much about spending pocket change on it.
But there's no way to make a functioning micropayment system currently. It's not feasible to have credit-card payments for sub-$1 transactions because of the high per-transaction fees, and Visa/MC have a cartel going where you have to use them for any kind of credit/debit payments.
SV needs to figure out how to make easy, low-fee micropayments a reality, and then we'll see some change.