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Have you ever offered Premium Membership?
Daniela Arens
Member since:
1 year 36 weeks
1 year 36 weeks
Last activity:
3 weeks 4 days
3 weeks 4 days
Have you ever offered Premium Membership?
Posted Fri, 28/11/2008 - 18:36
At Linqia we had several conversations with community managers and owners on how to go about Premium Memberships. It is obvious that creating and hosting a community costs money and that advertising and sponsorship are not always sufficient to cover these costs.
However, it is difficult to communicate this to the members of the community. Some of them understand but this still doesn´t mean they are disposed to pay money to use a commuintiy. Do you have experience in this area?
What is the best way to go about Premium Membership from your exeprience?
What did you offer in return? Were your members disposed to pay?
What kind of problems did you have to face?
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Necessity v's Free Will
XING was the first social network/ community to successfully charge premium members at a time when LinkedIN and others simply didn't think it was possible. It set a precedent and enabled XING to IP for €157 in December 2006.
Many have followed in XING's footsteps and some have been successful whilst others haven't.
So what had XING's members pay premium membership? The following may shed some light on this topic:
1. A member couldn't message another member unless they paid premium membership
2. One of the hottest features was 'who's been looking at my profile' and just for that reason many people paid the monthly fee
3. In countries such as Switzerland, if you weren't a premium member then you were seen as a social outcast by some. It was a reflection of one's financial status even though some of these members never visited the site
In XING's case it is a matter of necessity. To participate in the community you need to be able to send and respond to messages. Whilst the community are crying out for this feature to be free it could have serious impact on XING's ability to monetize even though they've pursued other offerings which are proving success.
What about communities who have premium membership and members register at their free will?
Communities who offer valuable content, experiences, quality members and experts will inspire members to pay premium membership to enable that community to thrive. Communities do cost a lot of time and money and it's natural human nature to reciprocate.
Other communities who successfully charge premium membership offer some form of exclusivity where there is scarcity of memberships available, access to people-content-events-experiences.
Simply creating a community and 'slapping' a premium membership onto it hoping people will pay is an illusion and will inevitably lead to failure.
Is offering too many free services bad for everyone?
Are Social Networking sites in danger of following the Newspapers - offering too much for free and commoditising their work?
The newspapers offer almost all their content online for free. This has set community expectations that news is now free and means an industry spanning hundreds of years has been commoditised in a few short years.
There are now limited options for the News Publishers to monetise their work. They can either offer high value, detailed analysis by respected journalists or provide dramatically different means of delivering content, like Amazon's Kindle.
The danger for Social Networks is that in the rush to generate large vibrant communities we offer too much for free and commoditise the industry.