It was reported today that according to a study by the USC Center for the Digital Future that zero – yes zero – people would pay to use Twitter.  Jeffrey Cole, the director of the Center for the Digital Future, says, “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.”

This is a refrain I’ve certainly heard before. After spending a decade working in the music industry, prior to the last handful of years in broadcast media, the constant topic of conversation was how to get people to pay for something we’d previously given them for free. For the music industry, the answer was fairly simple in principle (and much harder in practice). The answer was to focus on service and quality, and basically get the entire industry to completely re-think everything they previously thought a record label was. Though it’s taken a long time, some progress has been made. Most notably the changing relationship between labels and artists so that it is simultaneously more equitable while giving the record labels better incentives to focus their energy on an artist. For most artists, and I was once of them, too, the problem is always one of mindshare. The label will only push a handful of acts, and how do you become one of those handful? It used to be mostly luck and who you knew (as if it wasn’t hard enough just to get a record contract, you also had to make sure you had the political alignment in the company in your favor). The new approach is to provide more equitable financial relationship between artists and labels, which would be a fantastic approach if labels could be trusted. But that’s another conversation for another time…

For Twitter, the solution is far less clear. The problem with Twitter is not that it’s free or that it’s programmed user behavior. In actuality, people already DO pay for the things Twitter give you for free. It’s called text messaging and you pay your mobile carrier for it every month. The problem is that Twitter as a service is not what I like to call a “purpose driven” service. It’s been driven by marketers and leveraged to excellent effect by celebrities, but for the average user, there is very little purpose or need for them to use Twitter. What would happen if suddenly they couldn’t “follow” Britney’s exploits on Twitter? Well, they’d simply get them from their favorite gossip blog who’ll happily repost, or a zillion other sources. And you already have a great way to send short messages to your friends…those aforementioned carrier provided text messages.

So will any social networks be able to charge customers? Probably not, unless they’re purpose driven. LinkedIn can charge users who have the goal of using LinkedIn to either find candidates for open positions, or those who are job hunting and want to leverage LinkedIn’s tools. And let’s not forget that dating sites are really not quite different from social networks, especially with the functionality that’s evolved to match sites like Facebook. So the problem comes when you build products that have no clear underlying “purpose” other than that of communicating with your friends. Good luck getting end users to pay. Pandora has certainly learning this lesson, with some counts putting their paid subscriber base at less than 1% of their users.