Monetization feature for Social Networks that both Facebook and Google+ are missing

Couple years ago at Enterprise2.0 conference at Silicon Valley i met Oliver Marks from back then Sovos Group. In discussion around collaboration within enterprise i shared quote we used at RSC for E2.0 initiative - "Collaborate by Sentences, not Chapters!", that was later twitted and picked up some traction within hashtag #e2conf. Later i followed Oliver on Twitter and one of his quote became favorite in social networks discussions - "If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."

Later i changed the quote to end with "you are Finished Good with unfinished BOM", where BOM (Bill of Materials) implies personal information of "customer" that is not yet collected. Well, and Finished Good obviously implies "product being sold".

So as result all discussions about privacy invasion on free web services is just simple BOM exploration by manufacturer :-)

On serious note I'm promoting concept where access to social networks is paid service, but with opportunity to gain money back in partial, full, or even with extra. Simple idea is that paying consumer would have completely ad-free environment, which is not big deal. But enhancement of this is that each "like" of paying customer is allocating fraction of his monthly fee to content owner. Fraction is determined as 80% of monthly fee divided by number of likes per month. 20% of monthly fee goes to Social Network revenue. Accrued cash to content owner can be redeemed only when becoming paying customer as well.

For example, if i pay $10 per month to access Facebook without ads, better privacy protection, and with SQL-like access to data (always been a dreamed feature) and during month i liked 10 posts from 10 different "social friends" then each post owner would get accrued 80 cents ($10 x 80% / 10 likes). In order to be eligible to redeem accrued amounts 10 owners would have to sign up for premium service themselves. Accrued cash never expires and keeps growing to lure customer to paid service. And Merry goes round and round and round...    

This simple process may encourage to post better quality content as there is incentive now to generate "likes", and encourage to become true customer by signing up for paid service of ad-free experience with option to earn cash.

And maybe i can see time when Facebook or Google become Database-as-a-Service with granted SQL access to data and only optional skin to present data in adhoc website mode.

September 15th, 2013
Knoxville, TN