The billing systems (and customer support) you'd have to put in place for something like this would likely make it prohibitive. It's the flipside of "there's no such thing as a free lunch": there's no such thing as a free lunch payment (or pricing) system. Billing, collections, currency conversion, and end-user hand-holding ... it doesn't hold up. Advertisers are far fewer, find far higher value in the system, and on a per-unit basis are much more economical to tap.
Network effects are another huge factor. A large part of FB's value is that everyone's on it, and everyone's on it because everyone's on it and it's free.
You could conceivably come up with an end run around some of this, but it would take some creative thinking. I don't believe it's feasible to have the end users be the direct customers of such a product directly, though with a concentrating middleman, possibly.
The billing systems (and customer support) you'd have to put in place for something like this would likely make it prohibitive. It's the flipside of "there's no such thing as a free lunch": there's no such thing as a free lunch payment (or pricing) system. Billing, collections, currency conversion, and end-user hand-holding ... it doesn't hold up. Advertisers are far fewer, find far higher value in the system, and on a per-unit basis are much more economical to tap.
Network effects are another huge factor. A large part of FB's value is that everyone's on it, and everyone's on it because everyone's on it and it's free.
You could conceivably come up with an end run around some of this, but it would take some creative thinking. I don't believe it's feasible to have the end users be the direct customers of such a product directly, though with a concentrating middleman, possibly.