Mashable alerted the online marketing world this week to a study by USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism’s 2010 Digital Future Study that found ZERO PERCENT(!) of users would be willing to pay for Twitter or a similar service.
A direct quote from the article: ” ‘Such an extreme finding that produced a zero response underscores the difficulty of getting Internet users to pay for anything that they already receive for free,’ says Jeffrey I. Cole, the Annenberg School’s director of the Center for the Digital Future.”
This does not bode well for social media startups whose business model relies on subscription fees, or any other sort of fee for that matter.
Only time will tell how this eventually plays out for users and developers alike, but let’s hope someone somewhere at the top of the social media stratosphere takes a cue from the music industry’s colossal failure to accept that users have grown accustomed to obtaining certain things for free.
