Foursquare to Begin Charging Fees

Foursquare Labs said it would begin charging some businesses for access to its database of restaurants, shops and other local venues, as it tries to make money from information it has gathered from user "check-ins" in the five years since its founding.

The New York startup is negotiating with the heaviest users of its data to pay fees or offer services in return, Chief Operating Officer Jeffrey Glueck said. Deals will be reached on an ad-hoc basis with each developer and will affect under 1% of the 63,000 companies that use Foursquare's database, said Glueck, a longtime Internet executive who recently joined Foursquare.

The change in policy could jeopardize Foursquare's relationship with outside developers that rely on the service to pull the names and coordinates of local places of interest into their own apps. Popular applications including Pinterest, Twitter's Vine, and Yahoo's Flickr use this service to help users match content they post online to their geographic location. But the data fees could also help Foursquare create a new revenue stream to support its free mobile apps.