Twitter users unwilling to pay for service

Despite its popularity, Twitter recently learned few - if any - of its more than 80 million users are willing to pay to use the service. A survey conducted by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Journalism found none of the people it surveyed would pay for the service even if it became required for use of the popular social media website.

While Twitter has no plans to charge anyone for its services, the Annenberg report believes its survey results represent a trend in internet use - even people who rely heavily on the web are unwilling to pay for almost anything.

“Such an extreme finding that produced a zero response underscores the difficulty of getting internet users to pay for anything that they already receive for free,” said Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at Annenberg. “Twitter has no plans to charge its users, but this result illustrates, beyond any doubt, the tremendous problem of transforming free users into paying users. Online providers face major challenges to get customers to pay for services they now receive for free.”

Since first arriving in 2008, Twitter has become an integral aspect of the enterprise world due to the free marketing it provides companies looking to expand their customer base.