Facebook, looking for ways to personalise its platform and monetise its features, recently announced it would be trialling a subscription model for owners of Facebook Groups.
While only a handful of people have access to the feature so far, it's hard not to assume – barring some sort of extreme chaos – that the feature won't be rolled out across the site.
At a Facebook event in Sydney last week an employee told BuzzFeed News the slow rollout was to make sure any bad actors would be caught and problems fixed before it was made available to the general public.
Even so, how sure can Facebook be its Group administrators will use the feature?
The subscription service offers obvious benefit for lifestyle and DIY content and could even represent a new way of publishing news for media brands.
There's potential for every personal trainer and declutter-your-home expert to make a quick buck from offering exclusive content to those willing to pay for it. On top of this, moderating a group takes a lot of time. A subscription service could help sustain the effort required to keep your favourite Group a well-oiled machine.
However, a handful of Facebook Group owners – big and small – who spoke to BuzzFeed News said they probably wouldn't do it, and that their audience would probably be pissed off if they did.
Cool Dog Group has over 600,000 members. You're probably one of them (if not, you should be) and it's filled with thousands of pictures of dogs in all sorts of predicaments. The Group's administrators told BuzzFeed News that, while it's good to consider every feature Facebook makes available, the Cool Dog Group community "didn't slide well into a subscription model".
"With Cool Dog Group what you see is what your get, we don't have any extra content we could offer under a paid service that we're not already providing for free," they said, suggesting the feature could be better used by information-based groups.
"I don't think it would go down well with our community as it is to be honest. Our members at the moment are fairly understanding that we volunteer our time and as such, we have more flexible relationship with them."
Elsewhere, over 50,000 people participate in the shitposting / nostalgia-porn of "it's 2005 and this is cool as Hell." The founder of the group, Rho Watson, said the most she would consider would be a "subgroup" that offered a service or products related to the group's theme.
"I think the main group will always be free to post in," she told BuzzFeed News. "At this point, we're leaning more towards avenues such as merchandise if we were going to monetise the group somehow."
As with the administrator's behind Cool Dog Group, Watson worried about what would happen to the community she had helped grow if she did introduce a pay-to-play model.
"The community comes first to me and sacrificing the majority of it to generate money or break even just wouldn't be worth it for me," she explained, saying she'd really only feel comfortable if there was a monetisation model that people wouldn't feel exploited by.
"Even if hypothetically we suddenly charged everyone, only a fraction of a percentage of users would stay and the participation would be affected accordingly."
Facebook's focus on Groups has also benefited the fringe political "supporters" groups that were, in their origins, splintered off from the general discourse and filled with only a few thousand members at most.
Now, these groups have grown into the tens of thousands. One of them, the Pauline Hanson Supporter Group, labels itself as a place where supporters of conservative Australian politician Pauline Hanson and her party, One Nation, are welcome.
With 56,000 members, the Pauline Hanson One Nation Supporters & Discussion Forum represents a large chunk of conservative political discussion on social media and – when paired with a few other powerful Australian groups – has potential for incredible influence.
Its creator Jason Bennetts recently told BuzzFeed News it would not charge members for any sort of access: "Pauline and its supporter group will always come first and it is our top priority."
Bennetts said there were "myriad" implications to consider: "Let's say you have 30,000 subscriptions of $3 each. That's an income of $90,000 per annum. You distribute that among admin and then one day an admin goes rogue or doesn't do any work. Is that unfair dismissal? A lawsuit?"
The group, which is not endorsed by Hanson, could also be liable to pay a license fee to Hanson if it monetises the page. "What about GST? Income tax? Will the group need an ABN? Then there's defamation laws ... It goes on and on."
There are certainly a lot of things Group administrators will have to consider should they ever get the opportunity to participate in a subscription model. For what it's worth, one of the admins picked by Facebook for the initial subscription trial seems excited.
Sarah Mueller, who created a home improvement Group called Declutter My Home, said the subscription service will give her the opportunity to create group challenges, host live Q&As, offer training, and organise mini projects. But the paid service seems like it's going to be separate to her original group. "[I will] still keep the original group as a robust community for getting free advice and motivation," she told Facebook.