Have you ever seen those groups on Facebook that declare boldly, “We’re against Facebook charging for usage”? The “Petition against Facebook charging money”? Search for it, if you want; but know this: Facebook will never charge money for usage. In fact, I’d argue that they should be paying you for logging in an noodling around.
Take a look at F8: Zuckerberg, if you get past the jargon, wants to map all of the relationships on the web. Why? Because this is valuable to businesses, large and small. It is valuable to non-profits. It is valuable to governments. It is valuable to regular citizens. It is valuable to everyone.
If you want information on people’s needs, likes and habits, you need as many people as you can get. This is what you’d learn in any statistics class.
If you’ve ever tried to use a US appliance outside of the country, you also know that you need the same format to connect to the same network. Therefore, to make a map of the network of all these folks, you need them all in the same place, on the same format.
In short, they need everyone to get on Facebook.
Charging a fee for Facebook would raise the cost of entry (literally!) and mean that there are fewer people for Facebook to add to their map.
Facebook doesn’t charge because they know the value of each person they add for free will outweigh a subscription fee significantly.
So think about this: Why doesn’t Facebook pay us to use it?
