B2B Communities should be paid NOT free Thomas Power & BrightBull

1998, the community thing you guys started, pioneered that element. 2021, the word community is on every business leader, any B2B organization, any B2C organization that has a very solid, serious digital mindset on how to engage their customers. They're thinking about online communities from that point to now. What do you see has been the evolution? How has this online communities thing evolved from how it was now and how it is right now? What's your take on that? So my answer to that would be, Penny and I have always believed in paid communities. We never believed in free. So looking at the 650,000 members, members either pay £2amonth or £10amonth or £100amonth for sort of a bronze, silver, gold level. When Free arrived with LinkedIn in 2003, and then 2004 with Facebook, and then 2006 with Twitter, free was the new thing. Everything was free. Everything should be free, all things should be free. And the world would be fantastic. And we all live off advertising. If we look at the 20 years performance of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, it's been fantastic for their shareholders, it's been fantastic for their founders. But have those platforms really delivered for their users? No, because they're free. And where it's free, it's very hard to find intimacy, trust, belonging and self esteem. I'll let Penny give her view on that. Yeah, I mean, Thomas, he and I are very different. I see gray and Thomas sees black and white, which is, which is fantastic. And so anybody listening watching will see that I see the world a little bit in a more. I don't mean gray as in a dull color. I just see more of a blended thing. I think Thomas is right in that, you know, I do believe in free. Okay. But I want us to make sure people understand that that isn't purely for commercial reasons. It is actually for the user experience. Because what we experienced, we started off a little bit free, then we went into paid membership and we had these different levels that Thomas talks about. We saw that the experience people were having that were only paying $10 or €10 or £10 was having was far richer. And it wasn't purely because we were giving them more tools. It was because when you paid for something, you, you committed to it. And they looked out for other people in the network that were also a paid user. And literally you could connect with a free member. But people wanted to silo themselves into where are the other people that truly believe in this community and are here and they've got some skin in the game. And so we. We could observe that. And we had. It was an experiment in a way, but we could observe that.