The rumor that Facebook will suddenly start charging users to access the site has become one of the social media era’s perennial chain letters.
While Facebook prominently advertises that its service is “free and always will be” on its homepage, it hasn’t stopped false rumors of a pay scheme from going viral on numerous occasions, most recently in conjunction with the major profile redesign that the site announced earlier this month.
Of course, Facebook is in business to make money. Beyond advertising, it has found ways to profit directly from its users through Facebook Credits, a form of currency that can be used on the site in social games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars etc.
In the future, we expect Facebook to find additional ways to monetize. The company could grow its credit system to become a rival to PayPal. We could also see Facebook extending its ad platform beyond the social network itself and onto the wider Web — in order to compete with Google’s AdSense.
There’s also potential in ecommerce. Although Facebook’s Deals product fell flat, an increasing number of merchants are starting to sell their wares directly on the social networking site. Might Facebook one day provide its own tools for powering such activity? It’s certainly possible.
The one thing that all of these models have in common is that they need a critical mass of users to be successful. Facebook has that, and would never risk losing it by charging users for basic access to the tools that make its multi-billion dollar business work.