Will you pay to use Sharpcast?

Social networking Web sites are almost everyhwere you look on the Internet. There are dozens of these sites today, and virtually all are free to use. MySpace and YouTube, are two of the most popular ones. A few of these social Websites offer, in addition to a free account, premiun account upgrades.

One example is Sharpcast, a service that makes it easy to sync and backup files and photos between your pc, the web, and your mobile phone. It’s a very simple, but elegant service. Once you sign up and upload your photos to your desktop, for example, it auto synchronises your collection between all three platforms - pc, your personal sharpcast url, and mobile phone. Not bad.

Sharpcast’s starting account is free, but you may upgrade to a premium account for $6.00/month. That’s $72/year. Again, not bad. But how many or what percentage of it’s members would pay and upgrade to the premium account? I dont’ know and I do not have any figures from Sharpcast. However a recent survey conducted by Parks Associates gives us an insight.

The survey found that “72% of social networking users would stop using a site if required to pay a $2 monthly fee”. That’s $4.00/month less than Sharpcast is charging for a premium account. Now, what percentage of social networking users would stop using a site if required to pay $6/month? Not sure, but you can bet that the percentage will only creep higher.

So then, how will services like sharpcast turn a profit? The simple answer is they do not have to. The prayer for most of these sites is acquisition: Offer a good service, become very popular, and hope that a major player comes knocking. Sharpcast has a very good service, and I think the company has a very bright future. But is acquisition in it’s future? I don’t know, and my psychic is on vacation and not answering her phone.