Facebook Rant: Why they’ll never charge (and why people are dumb)
Originally posted as a Facebook note entitled: “Why Facebook will never charge (aka you’re all stupid)”
Recently, I’ve seen a number of friends join the “Don’t charge for Facebook” groups. First off, you’re all idiots, and that’s okay, I still love you. I actually did join one of these groups, only to post a very similar rant on their forum, but my post was either lost or deleted. Meh.
Facebook will never charge you to use their site. It is far from their best interest to do so. See those completely unrelated boxes on the right side? Those are ads. Advertising pays for Facebook, the same way it pays for 90% of the content on the internet, all of your network and non-premium tv, your magazines, your (dying) newspapers, and your morning radio shows. Essentially, all of the media around you.
So we’ve established ads pay for Facebook. Duh. But wouldn’t charging a fee for an ad-free Facebook make more money than what the ads bring in? Not necessarily. While on the surface it’s a good idea, there are a number of things outside of money that would adversely effect the site. Facebook is a community, and charging users segregates the community. Not only that, paid users usually demand more than an ad-free experience, and if paid users were given preferential treatment, that would only serve to segregate the community more (aka “free” users asking why they’re not getting some killer feature in the “paid” version, etc.)
That paid model works in certain circumstances, such as Flickr or Vimeo, but on a site where people are to connect on a level playing field, again it just segregates the larger community.
Going back to advertising - it’s in Facebook’s greater interest to get as many users possible to sign up. More users = more eyeballs glaring at the advertising. With more eyeballs looking at the advertising, Facebook can then go to their advertisers and tell them that there are x number of people in this demographic, more than the competition (who is more Twitter now than Myspace), and charge the advertisers more money. Essentially, more eyeballs = more money.
Which makes me laugh when I see all these “Facebook will begin charging their users” groups popping up, because really what you’re doing is creating more attention around something, creating more page views, and more eyeballs on the advertising. In a kind of screwy ass-backward way, the “No Paid Facebook” groups are keeping Facebook from going the paid route, but the issue is that it’s not an issue in the first place.
And that bring up my biggest pet peeve - all the “I hate the new Facebook” groups that inevitably occur when Facebook makes a change. If you really, really dislike the way it is, leave. The complete irony in using a service to talk down upon it boggles me a bit. No one is forcing you to stay on Facebook. By not only staying on Facebook to complain about it, you’re actually giving them page views, your eyeballs, and money to complain.
The more activity you have on Facebook, the more you ensure it’s survival. A few years ago, LiveJournal made a change in their Terms of Service that its users did not like, and the community there came up with a site-wide day where no one was to post. That day, traffic on the site spiked as thousands of users posted, “I’m not going to post for 24 hours.”
The point of my rant? Complain more. It amuses me and keeps the site running.
