I keep hearing around the web from people I respect that App.net is cool, but that it won’t survive unless it hits critical mass. That social networks in general have to have millions and millions of users, or they don’t work.
The reason people believe this is that just about every social network up to this point has been financed by advertising (or not financed at all). If you want to run a service on ads, you need as many eyeballs as possible to cover your nut.
But App.net is charging users a yearly fee. $50 a year, at the moment, to become a member. While I imagine this price will go down over the coming months to open the net a little wider and attract some more users, I disagree with Marco Arment and many other prominent bloggers that it has to drop down to $10 or less a year in order to be successful.
Of the millions and millions of people on Twitter, how many do you follow? Currently, I’m following 231. And that’s already too many for me to keep up with every day. If App.net gets a couple hundred thousand users, even, who are paying a premium for the service and therefore are more likely to be using it for thoughtful conversation, rather than spewing nonsense, I think I’ll be able to find 231 people who produce content worth reading every day.
So who cares if Ashton Kutcher ever joins App.net? We have Stephen Fry already, and that’s a thousand times better. The mass of dreck that’s becoming harder and harder to avoid on Twitter is exactly the reason why App.net needs to exist. If the goal were to become a Twitter clone, App.net stands no chance of surviving at any price. $1 a year is still more expensive than free.
If you’re going to charge money when all of your competitors are free, why not go all out and charge $25 or $30? You’ve already lost the cheapskates. Focus on people who value a good product.
As far as I’m concerned, the only thing App.net needs is a decent crop of iOS, Mac, and Android apps (which are already on the way), and a new name. For everything else, they’re doing just fine.
To paraphrase Steve Jobs, for App.net to win, Twitter doesn’t have to lose.
That’s not to say that this experiment will definitely work out in the long run. I’m just saying that charging money and trying to maximize eyeballs are incompatible strategies at this point.
