Twitter's Fucked
My rule is that if nobody would pay for your service, you probably don&#x27;t have a worthwhile business.<p>If Google instituted a $0.99 monthly fee to use Google search, people would line up to pay it. They don&#x27;t have to, because their business model works differently, but they <i>could</i> do that, and it would work. I&#x27;d probably pay for an account.<p>If Facebook instituted a $0.99 monthly fee to use that, a lot of people would do it just because it keeps them in the loop with their friends. And in fact, many people would be willing to pay $2.99&#x2F;mo for a business account which gets to do more (like post more events or whatever). Again, this isn&#x27;t their business model, but this would totally work as a business model.<p>People would pay for Uber de-facto; they <i>do</i> pay for Uber.<p>Likewise, half my coworkers have bought coin packs in Pokémon Go. In general, lots of games do pay models.<p>If Twitter added a $0.99&#x2F;year fee, there would be a clone written in a more scalable architecture taking all their users within a week. Some businesses would keep Twitter accounts, but that number would decrease as they lost users. Remember that Twitter added some minor advertising and instantly started losing users.<p>There are tons of other startups with this problem. The idea these days is, get a bunch of users and introduce ads. The problem there is that when you add ads, you&#x27;re fundamentally changing your service. It&#x27;s a bait-and-switch. And once you do the switch, if people weren&#x27;t willing to pay for your service before, they&#x27;re not going to want to start paying for it in the form of ads.