How Much Would You Pay for Your Twitter Account? (All Other Things Equal)

Now this is why its so painfully difficult to monetize social websites - the users are too tight fisted and/or broke. Its not household income that should be measured in the surveys, its household spend and oy oy its the ones who spend most of their time on social sites who have the least spend of all. Social is a laboratory.......a petri dish

I'd pay up to perhaps $20 CAD a year for Twitter, no more. With open-source, open standard microblogging available, I could easily hook something into my website that allows me to continue to enjoy the benefits of Twitter without paying a cent!

I pay for Flickr Pro, which works out to be only about $30 CAD a year for me. But I would have chosen against that if it weren't so inexpensive and yet offering so much. I can't imagine what Twitter could offer to people to make it worth paying for, yet I'd want to help the service out a bit if I could see value to it. But if people would abandon it at higher costs, then the value I'd get from Twitter would decrease proportionally.

I happily pay U.S. $24.95 a year for Flickr, which is a bargain when you consider what it offers. I also paid $20 a year for a Pownce Pro account because I wanted to support a service I used daily. So, were Twitter to start offering pro accounts, I'd see the price point being somewhere in this ballpark. Many people are already comfortable with this pricing on other services, and its affordable enough to keep the playing field level.

I love Twitter. Could I live without it? Yes. If I was asked to pay for it would I be able to find something similar that offers a free service? Probably. Or I'd go back to boring old e-mail. But I would never pay for it. However, I think it reasonable that corporates should perhaps pay, or advertisers (including celebs who advertise).

A good service. But I don't think Twitter is going to ask all its users for money. Particularly going to be free if you tweets less than 10 / day.