Wanna Be a Popular Social Networker? Prepare to Pony Up
Wanna Be a Popular Social Networker? Prepare to Pony Up
There’s a new way to win popularity on a social network: Pay for it.
Year-old social-networking site Badoo offers an antidote to the increased commercialization of rivals such as Facebook and Bebo by banning advertising. Instead, revenue is driven by charging members to move to the top of a rolling list of profiles using a feature called Rise Up.
Badoo claims that 20% of its users access the function once a month and some pay eight or nine times a day to Rise Up. The idea is that people want a mass audience for their personal content and are prepared to pay for it. To keep it simple, users are charged, depending on their location, $1 in the U.S., one pound in the U.K. and one euro elsewhere in Europe. The fee is paid via a text message from the user’s mobile phone.
Source: AdAge.com