> Most people wouldn't or they would charge for access and increase their RoI. Search isn't really valuable to Google, they make most of their money in ads.
They make money from ads… which people see when they use search.
Ad-support allows for a much greater userbase which is a key ingredient to having a good search engine or a good social network. It doesn’t mean people wouldn’t pay a lot for those services if they were paywalled.
Of course if, say, Google charged for search, users could defect to Bing.
But the argument here is that Twitter’s users won’t defect anywhere. Its social graph is too valuable for them and a coordinated move somewhere else is borderline impossible.
EDIT: as a baseline, consider how many users are willing to pay for purchase/subscription to different Twitter apps. And that’s only a different (presumably better for the buyers) front end, not the core service.
They make money from ads… which people see when they use search.
Ad-support allows for a much greater userbase which is a key ingredient to having a good search engine or a good social network. It doesn’t mean people wouldn’t pay a lot for those services if they were paywalled.
Of course if, say, Google charged for search, users could defect to Bing.
But the argument here is that Twitter’s users won’t defect anywhere. Its social graph is too valuable for them and a coordinated move somewhere else is borderline impossible.
EDIT: as a baseline, consider how many users are willing to pay for purchase/subscription to different Twitter apps. And that’s only a different (presumably better for the buyers) front end, not the core service.