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Comment by cyphunk | Hacker News Reader

you point out something important. for-pay models don't properly deal with income disparities. you can be sure that for a portion of current 2.2b users $2 a month for access would be a significant chuck of their income.

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What's the benefit to Facebook for catering to such people? Presumably, advertisers can only sell cars to people that can afford cars. Or is this where Cambridge Analytica comes in? Then the equation stops being about selling things and becomes selling consensus. Maybe that was the plan all along.

The cool "starving artist" types putting up their events/content on Facebook is what makes it valuable to the rich people they want to advertise to. So it's not as simple as just keeping the people who can afford to pay.

People who can't afford cars still buy other things, therefore 'such people' also contribute, albeit less in absolute values. The amount of a purchase of a big spender is greater, therefore he is worth more to an advertiser. This means each person financial contribution to a ad supported service is proportional to its spending (or more precisely to his ad motivated spending). That is not equal to being proportional to each viewers income, but these amounts are probably correlated.

Also, as lmm commented, the more people using some services, the more value they provide, so having a fixed price would be a net loss for everyone.

Freemium + IAP does this well, but I’m not sure how you could build a Facebook killer on that model.

Many possibilities to overcome this. Tell N friends about us and you get a month free subscription. Deals, coupons etc.. There are ways to achieve price discrimination. Who doesn't can/want to pay can get the service for free but has to endure a little more inconvinience.

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