Multiply’s Solution to Monetization? Charge People!

Posted by Nick O'Neill on June 25th, 2008 11:28 AM

While the debate over how to generate landslide revenues from social networks continues, Multiply.com believe that they’ve figured out a good solution for making money: charging its users for premium accounts. Caroline McCarthy explains the service, “Called a ‘digital scrapbook,’ this premium feature will cost $19.95 annually.” The digital scrapbook offers storage for high resolution images and 20 minute videos.

This new service appears to compete directly with Flickr. So how does Multiply compare itself to Facebook? Executives at the company like to avoid the “F-word” but in comments to Caroline McCarthy at News.com, Vice President Michael Gersh said “It’s much more organized and meaningful than some explosive megasite.” It sounds more to me like he is comparing the site to MySpace rather than Facebook.

The site appears to be experiencing sustained growth and its user base is extremely active, uploading millions of photos, videos and blog posts every day. Whether or not the site is as big as Facebook or MySpace, charging members for premium services makes a lot of sense. Would you pay to be a member of a social network? How about pay for premium services?

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Ken Burbary 1 year ago 1 point
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It depends on perceived value. I'll use Twitter as an example because I'm not using Multiply yet. Would someone new to Twitter be as willing to pay? Would an early adopter that gets/puts much more out of the Twitter community be any more willing? Each individual must decide that for his/herself. I would pay a fee to use it because I believe there lies significant value in the community that I've become a part of. It sure provides a heck of a lot more value to me than the $6.95/month I pay for ESPN insider!

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Jason Preston 1 year ago 1 point
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I remember back when I used LiveJournal freemium was the model there, too. Paying users could do some funky things with RSS feeds, get more icons, and had more customization power.

It seems to work pretty well for LiveJournal, since it's still around.

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Eric Dewhirst 1 year ago 1 point
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Pay to use is tricky - if you charge a penny it is a barrier to entry. This is the "give it to me free" economy and that is what people want and will continue to look for. Facebook could now charge a small premium but that is because they are a massive hub - if there are several options and one of them is free - that is where the traffic will go.

Cheers - Eric
blog.pickuppal.com

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