Hypothetically - What Google should have done with Google+

It's been a short time since Google announced their intent to close the consumer version of Google+.

While there's little doubt that Google will close the network for non G Suit users next year, there is a hypothetical middle ground between how the service was run and simply closing the door to the public.

Google+ as a consumer subscription service.

It's important to note how a subscription offering differs from Google's corporate offering: G Suit will continue to use Google+ as one of the under-a-domain services that Google offers business users.

A subscription offering for consumers would be akin to the subscription Google offers consumer accounts for YouTube premium for example.

Google's current baseline entry for G Suite is £3:30 per calendar month in the UK and comes with business Gmail,  video and voice conferencing, secure team messaging, shared calendars, business documents spreadsheets and presentations, 30 Gig of cloud storage AND a secure corporate social network (Google+).

Based on that what would be a reasonable consumer subscription price just to use Google+? Maybe £1 a calendar month, or £10 when purchased for a full year?

Would a subscription model make sense?

While a subscription model for a social network may at first seem like an untenable suggestion please read on, I feel it would have been a workable proposal, both for standard users, G Suit users and for Google.

For Google ...

Google didn't give much away in the announcement as to why they are sunsetting Google+ for consumers.

One of the most significant challenges in a public, open and most of all free social network is that of spam.

A subscription charge, no matter how small, would knock most of the challenges related to spam accounts completely on the head. Spammers do not want to pay.

A small subscription charge also means there are payment details registered to each account which helps limit sign-ups and considerably limits the potential for bot accounts which account for the majority of spam on a public network.

Google would accrue a small income to cover the resources to cover the development cost associated specifically with the consumer aspect of the network.

For Business ...

While the was not much evidence of corporate-to-public dialogue on the network, I would not downplay the possible loss for corporate users. 

We do not yet have a clear view of how the network will operate for G Suit users once the consumer version goes off-line in August 2019. Google dogfoods G Suit itself and as such is probably the biggest cooperate network within Google+. 

Each corporate instance of Google+, each network, can be set up differently. For example a business could have most of it's users restricted so they can only post within the domain: while other domains might choose to whitelisted some users, perhaps their communication team, or all users so that those  users could also post publicly outside of their domain.

After the consumer product is switched off it isn't yet clear if there will still be an "outside" option for G Suit users to post to. Google+ will probably be loosing the ability to post to "public", leaving only an internal corporate posting option: loosing one of the network's more interesting (though little used) use cases.

For standard Google account users / Consumers ...

Paying for what? 

I use Google+ both for public sharing and for private communication. People who never used Google+ to share private posts might not have considered that on LinkedIn the ability to communicate with users outside of your direct network will cost you a hefty base price of $29.99 a month (source). At that price point you can send three messages. 

On Facebook, free but loaded with Ads, you cannot share private posts with users you have not sent or accepted a "Friend request" with. That translates to you could "friend" up to a maximum of 5000 users, but doing so would also severely limit your ability to use the network with your real friends.

What about the low adoption problem?

The relative low adoption of Google+ was never a problem! For people who used Google+ for what it excelled at: connecting with like minded people, the network never felt small.

If Facebook has every user on the planet, but you can only actually communicate with a maximum of 5000 of them, the overall user number has no real bearing.

Google+ with it's "small" user base of a couple of hundred million is plenty more than one could ever know.

If Google offered a "pocket money" subscription version of Google+ for consumers would you use it?

I know I would.

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