ActiveRain to Start Charging for Access to Consumers
February 16, 2009 – 3:37 pmActiveRain, the very popular real estate social network, has decided to charge a monthly membership fee for all new members looking to reach consumers. This membership fee will be $29 per month and will give real estate professionals the ability to connect with consumers.
All previous ActiveRain members will continue to have the service for free. For new members that do not want to pay, they can sign up for the free service where they are limited to only connecting with other real estate professionals.
There are currently over 135,000 members that have signed up for ActiveRain.
In November of 2007, ActiveRain received $2.75 Million in funding from HouseValues.com which gave ActiveRain a post money valuation of about $8.5 million, or $100 per registered user. If the same metrics were used today, Active Rain could be valued at about $13.5 Million.
The Active Rain community has built the platform from the ground up. With each member, the community becomes stronger. To date, Active Rain has been acquiring about 130 - 140 new members each day.
Unfortunately, when you start to add a membership fee to a free community, the community begins to crumble. I hope this won’t be the case for Active Rain, but only time will tell.
3 Responses to “ActiveRain to Start Charging for Access to Consumers”
Hey Dan, Hope all is well,
This will be pretty interesting to watch. It is fascinating to me the number of real estate agents that have adapted to twitter, blogging and social media in general.
Thanks for keeping us abreast -Eric
By Eric Brown on Feb 16, 2009
Hi Eric,
Thank you for stopping by.
I think more and more real estate agents are going to continue to sway towards the free large social networks.
However, I think the fragmentation of social media will make it very difficult for some individual sites to become profitable on their own. Those that have the best chances are the aggregators and distributors. i.e. friendfeed, Google Open Social, Ning, etc.
By Dan Daugherty on Feb 16, 2009
Hello,
thats right! It will be difficult for the small, individual sites to make profit, while the real estate agents are rolling over the big social networks.
But who pays ActiveRain for that when you get it for free at other sites?
I’m looking forward the future. We’ll see what this will get us :-)
By Flüge Australien on Mar 19, 2009