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And due to almost-certain attrition it wouldn't necessarily result in higher revenues. Maybe per-user, but.


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That makes sense for revenue but how would that drive a loss of users? I’m not seeing the connection and would like to understand.

That's assuming their userbase is a lot less elastic than it probably is. They'd have to retain at least half of their current users in order for that to even come close to replacing current revenue. The reason these pay-with-your-privacy businesses are so successful is because charging actual money is a huge barrier that will drive away many customers.

I said the lost revenue if the feature were offered wasn’t important. I didn’t say anything about the value of the users.

I said the lost revenue if the feature were offered wasn’t important. I didn’t say anything about the value of the users.

That’s not really answering the question though if they are losing users, there is still the question of what accounts for such a surge in revenue.

I imagine it would be frustrating for companies which have actual real revenue and growth as opposed to ones that have grown 800% from 1 to 8 users in 3 months.

Fair points, but the article is only trivially about the users. It's really about revenue generation.

It may also be possible they may be able to get more revenue per user. Even a $0.01 increase in revenue per user is substancial given their numbers.

What if that's 10% or more of their customer base? I doubt they are willing to lose the revenue.

If it were, hypothetically, come percentage of new users who were consuming most of the resources, it would still be just as big a problem. (In fact, maybe more so if a changing pattern of use suggests that your pricing model is no longer profitable.)

That would be against there money making model ? But I think considering 110k users, they can reconsider there business.

Yes - charge a lot more money for a smaller user base.

Yeah, but if we're going by a business features monetization model, what would matter is the number of businesses that are signed up, not the number of users.

Obviously, having a captive userbase to extract revenue from is good for their valuation. It probably isn't so great for the users though.

It would be expenses and profit, the remaining traffic keeps users coming.

Not necessarily. Sometimes more users is better than higher revenue.

If those 200 million users have to choose between paying you $20/year or paying only $1 and joining a network with 1 billion users...they'll probably choose the later. Then you won't see those 4 billion dollars.


Unless the cost of maintaining a 100x userbase outweighs the combined $$ value of the value added feature for the 1%.

I don't think this is primarily about saving money on licensing or bandwidth or whatever. It's more about what percentage of the accounts that are sharing will pay for an extra user, or will have one or more of the ejected users get their own subscription, and whether that added revenue comes out to more than the loss from people just dropping the platform.

I only meant that their costs are too high compared to the revenue per user. It's absolutely true that they could solve their profitability issues by increasing their revenue per user assuming that didn't in turn increase the costs.
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