Like many social networking services, Foursquare has historically had a monetization problem—they provide a service, the service is definitely value but the service doesn’t directly generate any money.
Foursquare seems to have come up with a piece of its corporate monetization puzzle—charging the businesses that rely on its location data. The company announced yesterday it would begin issuing fees for access to the check-in information it has gathered over the last five years.
Chief Operating Officer Jeffrey Glueck told The Wall Street Journal that the new fee schedule would mainly affect the service’s heaviest data users and that less than 1 percent of the 65,000 companies that are hooked up to Foursquare’s geolocation data will be charged for anything at all.
This is one of a slew of monetization initiatives the social service has engaged in lately; Microsoft recently invested $15 million in exchange for a licensing partnership with access to the company’s API.
Foursquare’s move to sell its data is also concurrent with a splitting off of the company’s product into two smaller apps—check-in focused Swarm and recommendation focused Foursquare.
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