There may be plenty of ways for Twitter to make money, but it doesn't look like charging membership fees will be one of them: a recent survey showed that zero percent of users would pay for the service. Zilch. None.


Zero. Nada. Zip. Zippola. Goose egg. This is fun!

Of course, some people will pay for anything, Twitterati included. So 0% is as misleading as any other survey result with a wide margin of error. But a result so severe still indicates that getting a critical mass of people to fork over their ducats for the right to tweet is going to be nigh impossible.


The finding comes from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism's 2010 Digital Future Study, which throws a little cold water on the notion of transitioning users from free to paid services:

"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."

The rest of the study—which costs $500 for personal and $1500 for corporate use—chatters on about what kind of ads people would rather see and when. And while we normally don't dive too deep in those types of waters for the reasons mentioned above, it was just too hard not to notice quite so large a fail whale. [USC via Mashable]