1) The answer is yes. 2) The downside to this is that others would not, and the loss of community would make #1 less rewarding. 3) When one service goes "for pay" another would rise up for free, negating #1. - Louis Gray
Not if there is a good free version like Flickr does it. That's essential. - Janet Tokerud
Flickr's free service is useful only for people who are content to be the audience. Once you start making regular use of it you quickly run into limits that force you to decide if you want to pay or stop playing. - Adewale Oshineye
Possibly, but the cost of services on the net inevitably trend towards zero... - Tanath
When we pay for any service, we also tend to be more demanding. It we paid for Twitter when it was down for 3 days, we would have been much less tolerant. We expect customer service to increase and be more accessible when we pay for services. Now if only the cable companies would learn that. - adventureran
I'll occasionally pay for web services, but there are only so many I can afford to pay for. I'll pay for the ones that matter most to me and that have the greatest impact on my web-sperience. I pay for Flickr because of the community and because it is a back-up of all my photos, a useful service. I don't see another free alternative that does it as well as Flickr does. - Nick Malaguti
Doubtful. It would likely have to lead to my making of money or saving me money somewhere else. I believe the only model for this now involves "Premium" services. - Vince DeGeorge
Yes, but then it should have these things 1) It should save me more money/time than what I am paying for it 2)It should have enough support facilities. - Varun Mahajan
By definition, yes. But a for-fee site doesn't necessarily have a sustainable competitive advantage. Someone like Google could come along and do an ad-supported version. - Mike Reynolds
Yes, I would. For example, I've been using 14dayz.com for a few years now, and paying for it. Great example of a site that provides value and is worth my money. - Raoul Pop
Thx everyone so far for commenting, will use the input for a blog post (hopefully tomorrow). Keep the comments coming ;-) - Alexander van Elsas
BTW Mike, would you use a ad based version instead of a free (non-ads) version? - Alexander van Elsas
yep, I pay for 37signal's backpack (£2.50 a month) - love it. Also marvel comics (£30 a year) - Adrian
Mike Sorry, I meant to say would you pay for a non-ads version? (guess teh answer is yes, but what if the services are the same? - Alexander van Elsas
@erwblo (Twitter) wants to know what type of services and why people are willing to pay for? - Alexander van Elsas
Yes, if it's easy to pay for, easy to cancel (if it's a recurring subscription), and provides personalization that's better than the one-size-fits-all big guys. - Ginger Makela
I would pay for a web service if it provided a valuable to service to me, picture storage, email, data backup etc. - Mike Fruchter
I would only pay for a 'Premium' service, and only if it provided good value. Twitter and FF are essentially information services, and the price of information on the web is approaching zero, so those premium services would need to aso provide unique functionality. Perhaps a better model is free (or ad supported) to consumers, a Premium offering, and also leverage the technology into an Enterprise offering. - via FriendFeedMachine - Scott Goldie
I'd only pay if it offered a substantial increase in value/functionality over other similar offers. (And you'd better believe there would be other free/ad-supported offers) This is especially true for "simple" services like twitter. - Daniel Bruce
would you pay for a service that was free for most people but charged the power users who presumable get the most use and benefit from it? in a sense, that is how web hosting works. you pay more if you get more traffic. could web 2.0 services work the same way? - mike
i pay for food, shelter, good tools, more rarely for information, very rarely for entertainment, even more rarely for diversion ... which is most of the crap on the web, including tech blogs - gregory lent
