It’s not a new discussion really, I can remember arguing about it at least a dozen times in the past few years, and yet, the subject does come up again every once in a while. The hypothetical, what if talk about charging a fee to register and/or participate in social networks. Will you pay to be a member in a social community? Will it work? What would have happened if social networks charged a fee right from the start? And so on.

Let’s start from the beginning (Which might have created a while new discussion about what is the beginning of social networks. Since it always ends up being the old dial-up BBSs, I will not get into that), or to be more precise, the wide spread of social networks outside the realm of the tech savvy. We’re talking mostly about the Friendster and MySpace era of social networks. What if MySpace charged a fee to be a member of it’s community? But before answering this question, a new question arise, how will they charge their users? Looking at the social network users demographics of the time, it’s apparent that the large majority of users were teenagers and young college students, the same groups who does not possess the means to pay online, certainly not five or ten years ago. They had no credit cards or Paypal accounts and no way to transfer funds online. So in the reality of the time the question is kind of mute.

Even if the payment problem was solved somehow, owners would have a hard time convincing users that the benefits of using a social network service are worth the fee. Especially when considering the time before users experienced the kinks of social networking. There’s simply not enough added value. Not that it’s never been tried before, Tickle.com, a site providing self-discovery, and social networking services was the first to introduce charges for access to some of it’s profiles, back in the beginning of 2004. This is somewhat the same case as today’s LinkedIn, which charges members for premium services, but LinkedIn, unlike Facebook or Google+, is a niche network specializing in professional contacts and it’s fees, like in the Tickle.com case, are for premium services only and are not a membership fee.

A recent survey revealed that 96.77% of social networking users will not pay any membership fee, 9.97% will consider paying for premium services, depending on the services offered. Many studies are trying to follow and track the rapid growth and the business model of such social networks. If recent polls numbers are any indication, social networks imposing a fee will completely halt it’s growth. A majority of social networks users say they would rather delete their accounts than pay a service charge.

The talk about some social networks considering minimal fees to monetize their networks has been going on for years, but I have yet to see that happen on a large scale. The subscription model poses many challenges, mainly the loss of users to free sites and loss of critical mass that is required to keep the whole social eco-system in tact, the premium service however may work in most instances. So although Facebook has experienced more rapid growth than LinkedIn, Facebook’s model is much easier to copy and replace than LinkedIn’s platform which has deeper business applications and more users who are willing to pay for premium services. The Freemium model with about 95% of free users and 5% paying for premium services seems to be the model that is working best at the moment.