Facebook will NEVER charge for users to access their accounts.

I saw this status pop up today:

FACEBOOK JUST RELEASED THEIR PRICE GRID FOR MEMBERSHIP. $9.99 PER MONTH FOR GOLD MEMBER SERVICES, $6.99 PER MONTH FOR SILVER MEMBER SERVICES, $3.99 PER MONTH FOR BRONZE MEMBER SERVICES, FREE IF YOU COPY AND PASTE THIS MESSAGE BEFORE MIDNIGHT TONIGHT. WHEN YOU SIGN ON TOMORROW MORNING YOU WILL BE PROMPTED FOR PAYMENT INFO…IT IS OFFICIAL IT WAS EVEN ON THE NEWS. FACEBOOK WILL START CHARGING DUE TO THE NEW PROFILE CHANGES. IF YOU COPY THIS ON YOUR WALL YOUR ICON WILL TURN BLUE AND FACEBOOK WILL BE FREE FOR YOU .!

Why would you ever fall for that? Facebook will never require users to pay for basic access to their site, and here’s why.

1. Users Would Quit

The biggest reason for Facebook never requiring a subscription would be that nobody would pay for it. Think about it – would you pay for a service you can get elsewhere, such as Twitter or Google+? Heck, even MySpace would start looking relevant again if you had to pay to use Facebook. Many people threaten to quit every time a little feature is introduced even though the service is free. ALL of those people would quit for sure if Facebook charged for their services.

2. It doesn’t fit their business model

Think about it – how does Facebook make their money? They don’t sell anything, therefore they have to rely on their revenue from ads. When you see “Sponsored” on the right-hand side of Facebook, someone has paid for those links. Advertisers have the option of paying per 1,000 impressions (every time it shows up on somebody’s screen it’s an impression) or per click. Therefore, depending on how the advertisers set up their ads, Facebook gets paid every time someone clicks on or views an ad. A huge part of the Internet works this way, with ads generating many thousands of sites’ revenue.

The way to earn more money with ads is to make a balance of being useful to visitors and getting as much money as possible out of advertisers. When Facebook makes a change, you can bet it’s either to generate attention to their services so that people will use Facebook more and click/view more ads (note that even the “I HATE THE NEW FACEBOOK!” comments keep the attention on Facebook itself), generate more revenue from the ads (It’s rumored that Facebook will soon stop delivering business updates into your feed unless you interact with them a lot, meaning that they will have to buy advertising on Facebook), respond to features of another service (Facebook is changing a LOT in response to Google+), or improve their performance (meaning their servers don’t have to do as much work). All of these things are driven by money.

However, there IS a way that Facebook could charge for some things like subscriptions to integrated music and TV services such as Spotify and Hulu. Remember Facebook credits in games and such? It’s rumored that they could use that system to allow users to pay for stuff like music.

In short, Facebook may charge for some things eventually, but access to your account and normal activities will definitely not be one of them.

Update: Shortly after publishing this post, Facebook released a comment on their page saying “A rumor on the internet caught our attention. We have no plans to charge for Facebook. It’s free and always will be.”