Are you willing to pay for a Twitter-like social network without any ads or "promoted tweets?"
Dalton Caldwell's App.net which offers such service he's got more than 10,000 people investing in it. The social network charges $50 annually, for giving you "real-time feed" which will be free of ads.
The site reached its $500,000 funding goal, and now has the money to move ahead with its work. Caldwell, the CEO of the start-up believes users will want to invest in this alternative to Twitter and Facebook just to be free of ads.
"If we're selling a service, our customers are our users and our job is to make our users happy," Caldwell said in the promotional video. "If we have a free, ad-supported service, our customers are our advertisers and our job is to make our advertisers happy.
"I think that a lot of the friction we're seeing from these disappointing services are just a reflection that all the financial incentive has to do with pleasing advertisers and not the user base."
Twitter became immensely popular with no real means to make profits, but now the company is selling promoted tweets, promoted trends and promoted accounts. It also has a tight control over its ecosystem and does not let outside developers any space. But Caldwell thinks the opposite.
"If you're not paying for a service, you're not the customer-- you're the product" he said as Facebook is making multibillion-dollar profits from advertising.
But the question is, are users ready to pay to use social networks? Will it be successful?
There is a potential, said Michael Gatenberg, analyst at Gartner Inc. "Steering clear of ads and letting your service open for developers gives us a glimpse of what Twitter might have been if it had taken a different route."
The membership fee for App.net might come down in the long run.
"I think people are getting hung up on the $50 thing right now," Gatenberg said. "It was about, 'Are people serious enough about this as an idea to put $50 on the line to help try to create the kind of service they want?'" The success of their fundraiser shows there's definitely a demand."
Just how successful App.net will be is unknown.
"(It) is a really interesting experiment," Gartenberg said. "Time will tell if there's a business here. But when Twitter started, I don't think anyone knew there was a business there either. It was a way to tell people what you had for lunch."
"Along these lines, there are still a great many questions that need to be answered before App.net should be thought of as an operating service, rather than just an alpha prototype," Caldwell added.
For donors, App.net is open in early "alpha" version. Caldwell said there is a more work to be done on this platform and needed something to show his backers that the service is imminent.
