"So Facebook must make money from the members it has rather than simply by adding new ones."
The test will be if they can charge for membership. People find phone service worth paying for. People find internet service worth paying for. Some people even pay for TV.
I get a lot of value from Facebook and I would be willing to pay a nominal subscription fee.
However:
• As a customer, my demands are much greater than as a user. I feel more entitled to make demands and get real attention than for a free service. Customer service becomes more important when money is involved.
• I would expect absolute control over my own data. No advertising. No selling aggregate data to advertisers. If I quit the side, my data needs to be gone completely, without a trace.
• If my friends started quitting the service in droves, due to fees, I might no longer consider it worth the money and would probably leave or wind down my involvement as well.
As a way to make that visible to Facebook (probably someone there is looking at that thread, but your vote count isn't visible...) - I would totally pay for FB also, at the price that linkedin or others are proposing.
My demand would then be data security, no advertising. Other users could stay on free service, but the apps they use shouldn't have access to my data anymore.
Yes, I think maintaining a free service would be necessary, much as LinkedIn does. Freemium seems to be working well for LNKD in a way that might be a potential way forward for FB.
I pay for bookmarks (pinboard), even though I have a free alternative right in my browser.
A paid Facebook would likely look different than today's Facebook, both in features and in financial organization, but it may be a more predictable and sensible investment.
That would turn users into customers. This would probably have interesting ramifications, in terms of what such users would begin to demand (and expect to receive).
They don't need to charge for membership. It doesn't need to be black or white. That's what apps are for. You should be asking, would users pay enough for facebook apps to grow their profits?
Facebook has had reasonable success with apps. But the whole app use/discovery/interaction/development experience on facebook has a lot of room for improvement (euphemism to mean it's terrible). And they do seem aware and willing to improve on this arena.
They can't legally charge for membership; the existing users, access to whom would be the product they would be selling, signed up on a page that said "It's free and always will be."
The test will be if they can charge for membership. People find phone service worth paying for. People find internet service worth paying for. Some people even pay for TV.
Would 50% of current users pay for Fbook?