This is pure genius if you ask me. Hits them right in the Ego. It's going to be a huge success.
It might work if the founders are already movers and shakers at the center of that world, and they use their personal influence to sign up a lot of high value people they know all at once.
Alternatively, maybe you hire a few professional trolls to flaunt their (not necessarily real) wealth in the most obnoxious ways possible, get Gawker's spiritual successors to write some clickbait about it, and attract actual rich kids with the free notoriety.
Alternatively #2, maybe it's a front for a high-end escort service, or drugs, or some other service of questionable legality. The trick being you have to sign up online and go through some other backchannel to get the actual service. So you can sign up and get plausible deniability with the money changing hands.
I want to see more of the web paid for directly, rather than funded through snooping. If some platform becomes hip because it is paid for, then it will give people food for thought.
A $50/month "social network", including whatever addons have been added to the platform by then would be a way in which the 21st century re-evovles the service which ISPs were providing back in the good ole' 1990s.
Call me cynical, but I don't think that will ever happen.
Even if it starts out that way, once the number of users stabilises and the board/investors/other still want commercial growth someone will notice how easy it would be to track the users and sell the resulting data and you'll be paying both directly and by having yourself tracked & sold in the background.
The information would be much more valuable than that for general web users too: you are automatically pre-selecting for people with enough disposable income that they'll pay $50/month for a social network subscription (to use your example).
[1] http://www.ibtimes.com/appnet-do-people-really-want-paid-twi...
...would be beyond the budget of a large part of the population. Not many people have $600/year to spend on a communications tool. The simple fact is, while it's quite distasteful, paying for services by giving away access to your social profile and contact information is a great leveller. Everyone can afford it if they choose to, so everyone gets to access the benefits of social media.
A network where you could pay $50/month in order to block the tracking features would be a great idea though.
You do realize many cellphone plans cost that much if not a lot more, right?
I could possibly live with paying for the privilege of using the web, if respect for user privacy is, um, guaranteed somehow. But that probably won't (can't?) happen, and we'd end up having to pay for the privilege of being snooped upon.
OMG. That's one month of disposable income.
"One-third of your membership is donated to charities helping kids living in poverty to study."
"Everyone can have an account on Instagram, but only really rich can afford their profile here..."
This is especially notable given that there are only about 100 words of content.
And who actually believes that they are going to give 1/3 of their profits with so little transparency about where it is going? It just reads as a cynical and dishonest hedge against all of the criticism that they will inevitably get.
That said, such explicit divides in a society are rarely a source of good for the world.
comes close. Supposed to be very good service and were featured on the Startup Podcast. It feels similar to TrunkClub but instead of outsourcing shopping for clothes one can outsource swiping right or looking at online profiles.
Just the term "rich kids" -- I doubt a rich kid would want to associate.
I hope they didn't spend too long writing the app -- well just to get this far, creating & launching the thing - that's not a fail. Hopefully they didn't outsource, though I suppose that's a skill too.
Showing oneself on the internet to anyone is not really comparable. How long before your identity and all your pictures on NewSocialPlatform are available on the internet and on google search?
edit: Just to be clear - at one stage of my life I lived in a "millionaires" closed community, so I know from my own experience how the kids are. Not all but I would say it goes 50/50. 50% are empty and showing off, and rest are either quite normal or even ambitious.
Plus, comparing a general internet access & phone plan with a specific online service seems odd. Even if I'd trust you with this number, paying $50 for 'the internet' or paying the same amount for WhatsApp 2.0 doesn't seem direcly comparable.
We then switched to T-Mobile's pre-paid plans, which start at $40/month. That's for 3 GB of data. If you want 5 GB, it's $50/month, which comes to $600/year.
Another data point to ad to sibling comments citing prices in Europe:
$4.80 monthly in Russia for 250 minutes, 250 SMS and 1GB.
£7.50/month = 500 MB data + 250 minutes + unlimited texts
£20/month = unlimited data + unlimited minutes + unlimited texts
Speed restrictions apply after 6GB of data usage.
edit: just checked US mobile pricing. Damn you guys are getting ripped off hard