Facebook Extends Charging For Messages. Great Move!

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO, shows off the new messaging system in Facebook. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Facebook has extended its fees for messaging model to the UK and elsewhere, specifically for messaging to people you do not know. Great move. I think it’s only a matter of time before charges become a normal part of Facebook life.
At this stage Facebook talks of the charges as a piece of hygiene – they are there to prevent spam.

“The system of paying to message non-friends in their inbox is designed to prevent spam while acknowledging that sometimes you might want to hear from people outside your immediate social circle,” Facebook said in a statement to the Sunday Times, quoted also by The Telegraph.
“We are testing a number of price points in the UK and other countries to establish the optimal fee that signals importance.”

 

So on the face of it, it’s a fee that gives you, the sender, the opportunity to signal to a receiver that you do not know, that you should be listened to.
Sounds very much like a LinkedIn Pro account to me.
The social network should be more open about a future where charging will be routine – there’s nothing wrong with going the same route as LinkedIn and tiering services, as long as basic network communications remain free.
Or of adding value in the way messages are delivered or indeed creating highly protected communities around services like health.
When Facebook began back in 2004 micropayments were difficult to make because of a lack of infrastructure and because of cost, but today there is a burgeoning market for ultra low cost services. In the crowdsourcing space whole nations are now looking to develop labor ecosystems that depend on what we might regard as micro-earnings.
Facebook’s charges are interesting because they are so high – with charges ramping up to around $15 for a message to a well-known celebrity.
I said when Facebook launched Home last week that ultimately they need to be charging fees for services that are of value. This current “experiment” is not about preventing spam but finding ways to add value to a network of over 1 billion people.
Now that Facebook has extended the idea, the possibilities begin to look interesting. Facebook spent 2012 becoming a mobile company (and Home is a way to extend mobile presence), which while necessary is not a route to riches. According to musically.com:

Facebook ended 2012 with 680m mobile Monthly Active Users (MAUs), with more people accessing it daily from phones than on the web (more mobile Daily Active Users (DAUs) than web DAUs, in Web 2.0 parlance). Mobile accounted for 23% of Facebook’s ad revenues in Q4, up from 14% in Q3. That’s $305m of mobile ads in Q4 alone.

But everyone in mobile content knows that revenues in mobile are a fraction of those in the old, pre-mobile web. Ad rates are lower and, as yet, there is no ad format that seems perfectly primed to garner audience attention.
The further Facebook dives into mobile the more stressing ads will be as a revenue source – yet Facebook relies on adds for 84% of its revenues. No media company wants to be in that position, though many are.
Mark Zuckerberg’s contention that Facebook is now a mobile company implied they would be dividing deeper into mobile, maybe into phones or, like Google, into infrastructure. I get the impression though that Zuckerberg is the last of the 2000s dot-commers, and believes there is a way to make Facebook work solely on the size of its captive audience whether mobile or not.
Life has to get more messy and more complicated. Facebook has to do what a million other businesses did before – charge its customers for value added services. Downstream there’s another debate to be had about that. Facebook needs to relate to its users as real customers who pay fees. In the meantime here’s a start – and charging in business has to be good.