Facebook Tests the Waters With Paid Perks

CNET reports that Facebook has experimented lately with a small group of users by offering people the chance to promote their own account status messages the old-fashioned way: by paying for them. The author of the linked article asks whether it's inevitable that "Facebook will have to start dinging users in earnest," post-IPO. Facebook still says "It's free and always will be," but that doesn't rule out paying for additional features — that's certainly a model that many game makers had adopted.

Re:Freemium at its best

[Anonymous Coward]

I have several former coworkers that now work for Facebook. The fact that the vast majority of posts you would find interesting are now hidden is a bug with their new sorting algorithm. They're still working on it. For now, one friend recommended using the old "Most Recent" feature instead of the broken "Top Stories" feature. My feed is 90+% Cityville crap even though I have the game blocked.

I know how frustrating it is. I posted a story a couple of weeks ago that I was going to be in the hospital for nearly a week for emergency surgery. Not a single person I've talked to since then saw the post. It was depressing thinking no one cared when in reality no one knew.

Re:Freemium at its best

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, no. I don't see things that my wife posts. She'll be sitting at the desk next to mine and tell me she posted some pictures or whatever and there will be nothing in my feed. I can wait a while and refresh the feed and still nothing. If I go to her profile, there they are. I have no idea why this happens. and it happens seemingly at random with only some of her posts. It's hard to check if it happens with everyone, since I only have a few Facebook friends and it's not like I'm regularly checking their profiles to see if they've posted other things I don't see. I'm subscribed to "All Updates".

Re:Who is stalking me?

[wmac1]

We have a social network website with about 2 million members and this exact feature (who visited my profile, and hidden visits) bring in 5% of the whole revenues.

35% comes from advertisement, 5% from other membership fees (enable other features), and remaining from commission of selling products and services on the website.

The website is ranked 600-700 on alexa and we have 2 other websites with the same size.

sage and report

[Anonymous Coward]

You see the flag there on the lower right of the message?

Click it.

"spam"

Bam, done.

Re:Freemium at its best

[timeOday]

Those are interesting stats, and I would never claim running a huge website was cheap or free. But you argued that a large site must place making money as their #1 priority, but that's not consistent with craiglist's website design, business practices, and public statements [businessinsider.com]:

CEO Jim Buckmaster, who is about to celebrate his 11th year in charge, told the Guardian,"any extra profit accrued is an unintended secondary consequence." The 11th most popular site in the United States and the 37th in the world has only 32 employees. It charges for job advertisements in 18 U.S. cities and $10 for apartment listings in New York as a way to meet expenses. AIM estimated the site's value at $1 billion, citing "untapped" commercial potential.

They would not have $1BN of untapped potential (i.e. unused ad real estate on their website) if their true motive were some version of "maximize shareholder value."