Just Because You Offer A Free Service, It Doesn't Mean Your Users Aren't Customers
from the blurring-the-lines dept
The world of Twitter got its collective knickers in a twist earlier this week when the company made a change to the settings of its service. The particular change was pretty small, but seemed to disproportionately effect "power users" and early adopters, so, of course, the uproar over it was pretty intense, and Twitter changed the change. The details of the change aren't all that important, but like with the response to Facebook's recent TOS change, it's dragged out some rather interesting opinions. A personal favorite of mine is the response to the backlash that since users aren't paying anything for these services, they have no right to complain. Apparently users should "pay up" so they have the right "to voice [their] displeasure as a customer rather than as a user" -- and this coming from a guy who writes a blog about open-source software. It's one thing for a business to ignore complaints that don't come from customers or potential customers, but in the case of free services, to imply that users' opinions don't count because they're not ponying up any cash is fairly ridiculous. Most free services rely on their users to create revenue in other ways, such as by providing traffic to monetize; alienation of users that results in a downturn in traffic, and in turn, ad revenue, has exactly the same effect as losing paying customers' repeat business. The distinction between "customer" and "user" is, in many cases, becoming increasingly irrelevant. And never mind that in many instances, such as with Twitter and Facebook, it's impossible for users to become paying customers. It's hard to imagine that either company thinks it's okay to ignore its users simply because they don't pay.
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Filed Under: customers, free, service, users
Companies: twitter
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On the other hand, he also never paid to have the priviledge to have his software (Alfresco) be put my networks. I demand that he pays up before he starts complaining about that.
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It reminds me of dramas in online games. They can be down for an entire day, or week for that matter. They come back at the subscriber with "well you only list a dollar or two".
Hardly in the spirit of things.
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That being said, it's not as if they broke anyone's business-critical software or anything.
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Typo
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Users have the right to complain about a free service but should not expect the same response they might get if they were paying customers.
There is a distinction between users and customers. The scarce good these services have is the service itself - no one wants a Twitter t-shirt to go with their free service.
Perhaps the scarce good they need to sell is customer service itself - you get what you get for free.
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Sadly,
I blame it for about 40% of open source project failures.
IMHO, It would be a completely different thing if the project was being marketed as shareware, I could understand it then.
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Hooked users?
Twitter may not be able to charge directly for access to all of it's services. But it does have a good foundation to establish premium services and charge for them. I know there would be a long line of people who might complain at first, but then quickly sign up as they realized how much of their current business model depended on Twitter.
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A quick note about the title...
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Yeah, like no one would want a TPB t-shirt to go with their free service either. Oh, wait...
http://www.bytelove.com/partners/kopimi-/-tpb/the-pirate-bay-premium-bamboo/prod_56.html
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Re: Sadly,
Yep. As an example, there has been a bug in Ubuntu for years that causes it to crash on certain configurations. But the developer responsible for the module causing the problem just keeps closing out bug reports on it. (Keeping up appearances?) His explanation is that it isn't a problem for him personally on his system so he has no intention of ever fixing it.
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Re: A quick note about the title...
Also, with the turnover rate on public opinion for networking sites, you would think that they would value their reputation and user goodwill over all else. The public is fickle and will remove Twitter from their favorites list in a heartbeat if they perceive better value elsewhere.
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