Facebook groups are a great way of learning from other people and developing your knowledge but they can be a lot of work for the administrators without much return. That could soon change with this announcement from Facebook that they are trialling a subscription service to allow groups to charge between $4.99 and $29.99 per month (approx £3.75 to £22.60)
During the trial, Facebook would not take a cut from the groups charging a fee but since the subscription would be managed through the Facebook app on the users phone, the App Store/Play Store would take a percentage.
It’s an interesting new feature because Facebook has always said that their site will always be free and this could be seen to go against that message. Of course, group admins could technically charge a fee to be a member of a private Facebook group (which Facebook acknowledges in their press release), but this new feature will build it in which could both encourage more group admins to charge, and give the user more confidence in making a payment to someone as the payments would go through a trusted payment system (at first, through iOS and Android billing systems, but Facebook could technically do it through their own systems)
We will never charge to be a member of our #blogclub or Bonjour, Blogger group – we think there’s a major value in having a space for bloggers and future bloggers to come together and talk easily. It may be something we look into in the future for other things, but we will be totally open about what the details would be.
This is interesting! I can see it being useful for groups which take a lot of time to moderate, or where a lot of content is given, say for courses.
Fascinating, I can only imagine they’re trying to find ways to monitise after most people paying for advertising don’t want to bother anymore after the changes in Jan/Feb.