Breaking: Facebook Asks Users If They'll Pay For Vanity URLs
As Facebook searches for ways to increase their revenue, some users are being asked if they are willing to pay for vanity URLs. For those unaware of what vanity URLs are, they are the short strings that follow “facebook.com”.
Context & Ripple Effects
April 2009 has been a restless month inside Facebook: CFO Gideon Yu departed on April 2, the company opened its first site-governance vote to users on April 16, and top applications were still digesting a reported 25% traffic decline since the previous summer's redesign. Against that backdrop, surveying some users on whether they'd pay for vanity URLs reads less as a feature test than as a revenue-search signal.
There is also latent demand to price against: an underground market for Facebook public profiles was reportedly rising as of late April, meaning short, ownable addresses already carried informal value before Facebook put a question mark — or a price tag — on them. Whether users answer yes matters because Facebook's revenue story in 2009 rests almost entirely on advertising, and this poll probes the other side of the ledger.
First-order effects
- Surveyed users become unpaid participants in Facebook's pricing research, and a meaningful 'yes' hands the company a case for a direct-pay product layered on top of free profiles.
- The probe lands weeks after Gideon Yu's exit and amid declining widget-app traffic, so any willingness-to-pay data arrives at a moment when leadership has visible reason to diversify beyond ads.
Second-order effects
- If usernames go on sale, brands and squatters face a defensive land grab for scarce addresses — the rumored off-platform trade in public profiles suggests that market already exists informally, and an official price would formalize it.
- Application developers and page operators, already squeezed by the post-redesign traffic drop, would face a new cost line: securing the URLs their audiences type in.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social platforms stop treating profile identity purely as free real estate funded by advertising and begin billing users for presence — turning willingness-to-pay surveys into standing monetization R&D across the industry.
The trend: With ad revenue under strain in 2009, consumer internet platforms begin probing whether users themselves will pay for identity and visibility, not just advertisers for reach.