Facebook are still burning money way faster than they can earn it (OK – I’m excited about some of the advertising changes, but I don’t think that’ll square the circle). It’s been suggested before on occasion but maybe it’s time they put more thought into going freemium, even for regular users.
What would the key differences be between free and premium accounts? There’s not that much they could offer other than the following:
- Images
- Ad free (optionally)
Picture this
from Facebook
If you’ve tried using Flickr seriously recently you’ll have realised that there are a good number of reasons to go Pro. Access to your originals, higher resolution versions for people accessing your images as well as unlimited uploads, storage, sets and collections all make the upgrade worth the money.
Facebook is now more popular for photo-sharing than Flickr – owing to the integration with your network of friends and family and the resultant perceived privacy benefits of sharing on Facebook over Flickr. [As an aside, if you make an image private on either Flickr or Facebook someone can still load the image directly by referencing the URL, click the image embedded in this post to check that - something might need to be done there.]
Where Facebook falls down is that likely as a necessity of the fact that they’re now hosting over 10 billion images – the resolution is awful. With cameras getting better and better, creating higher resolution photos, downsizing to less than 640×480 is nonsense.
Undoubtedly the user experience in terms of image quality on Flickr is better but that’s not what matters to people who want to share their holiday snaps with their friends and family. Facebook’s ease of use for sharing wins out.
(Don’t) Show me ads
Giving users the option to pay and remove the ads (perhaps with a multiple-choice option – no ads / only ads from companies I’m a fan of / only ads relevant to my location / all ads) puts the decision in the user’s hands and I doubt Facebook are making anything like $10 per user per year in ad revenue.
What’s it worth?
What if Facebook decided to charge $10 a year to give you better resolution images, real image privacy, slicker image slideshows, and the ability to turn adverts off? 0.1% of customers signing up to that would put $175m in the coffers and take the company into the black. Would you pay for those features?
