Should Facebook be charging users

[Tarun Arora]

Have not blogged for a while, so thought will get right back to it. At a recent catch up with friends over beer, we started discussing if facebook should start charging users to monetize instead of trying an ad based model. Well the opinions were 50-50 with some people feeling that facebook will loose its midas touch if it starts to charge.

I am on the side of charging users or at least a free-mium model where users are charged for advanced services. I have always believed if a service is worth, people will pay for it. A case in point is meetup.com, a social networking site which has a monthly charge to create groups and still is hugely popular. I laud the founders of meetup for going for a paid model instead of a free service & an ad based business model.

This also invokes a basic question which I have pondered for a while. Why are most of the products / services on the internet designed free with no plan of selling anything / anytime to monetize. Maybe the top dollars that free services like Hotmail & You Tube have fetched has everyone mesmerized on free models as a mantra to amass huge traffic and then bailing out for millions.

I am not against free services and some new technologies do lend themselves towards that specially if they are new & disruptive (like Skype) but most of the products out there should either be charging customers or should seriously evaluate if they will EVER be able to monetize based on an ad based model.

On a lite note, this is how facebook will look with ads :)
http://andrewchenblog.com/2008/11/04/what-would-facebook-look-like-...