Freemium Facebook

What features of Facebook (existing or potential) would you be prepared to pay for?

   

I did some soul searching of my thrifty self and the conclusion I came to centred on privacy.  For the majority of members of the Internet generation who have come to equate ‘online content’ with ‘free’, any measures to implement a pay system for content that can easily be shared or transferred simply does not work.  You say I have to pay to view the full text of this news article?  No problem! Google can easily point me in the direction of another news website which has published this article for free.  Similarly, while it has been suggested that premium video or photo editing tools embedded within Facebook would be worthwhile ‘user pays’ features, I personally would be most likely to forgo the added convenience in favour of continuing to utilise free third party software.  However, should Facebook require me to purchase the right to alter the default privacy settings (something no other provider can offer me), then I would seriously reconsider my ‘Facebook-is-free’ mindset ... particularly in light of concerns surrounding the newly released Facebook Places (with a default privacy setting allowing your friends to check you in to any place at any time) which other bloggers have commented on.

Paying for privacy is no newfangled notion.  Certainly, people have (happily?) exchanged money for unlisted phone numbers, tall fences and curtains at home, even Swiss bank accounts!  Yet, there is conflicting evidence over whether people are prepared to pay for privacy within the online domain.  For example, while one study on online shopping found that participants were likely to purchase a product from a merchant that requested a greater degree of sensitive personal information than another in order to save as little as one Euro, a different study concluded that people were in fact willing to pay a higher price in order to protect their privacy (albeit, on average, only 60 cents more per $15 of value).  With contemporary preoccupations with privacy as a right, I suppose the question really becomes whether charging users for this right is a legitimate business model (and a sign of things to come), or an exercise in extortion.