Survey results: How much would you pay for Facebook without ads?
recode.net
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I don't understand why we've decided as a society that the advertisers DESERVE all the data they want. Better serving the needs of the consumer is complete joke, it's all about control.
This is one of the few area where the government, meaning you and I, NEEDS to step up and protect the citizens.
ALL data collection should be opt in, I should know what data they collect, who they share it with, and for what purpose. I should have the options to opt out and have all my data deleted.
I agree, and further more I decide what that information is and until I do the default is basically nil. We the people determine how this game is played, not "Advertisers".
I should have a Digital BILL OF RIGHTS.
I agree that regulation is necessary here, but I'm fascinated that you think tech/data privacy is a special case. Businesses in all sorts of industries are prone to abusing and mistreating people.
Take a look at the Terms of service for Grammerly as an example:
By uploading or entering any User Content, you give Grammarly (and those it works with) a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty-free and fully-paid, transferable and sublicensable, perpetual, and irrevocable license to copy, store and use your User Content (and, if you are an Authorized User, your Enterprise Subscriber’s User Content) in connection with the provision of the Software and the Services and to improve the algorithms underlying the Software and the Services.
IF you have Grammerly plugin in your browser they capture EVERYTHING you type into a browser, and you've given them all of the rights to that data, for which they can sublicense at fee. I can't think of a non tech/data situation that has the breadth and reach that tech/data area's have.
While it does seem like their TOS gives them the legal out to do this, is it not more likely that this is merely a CYA measure to cover any data they happen to collect and any way they happen to use it? If their TOS narrowly covered only the data they planned to collect and the uses they expected to have for it I would imagine every change to their code would become a potential legal liability.
It's not joke. Any company that has employees using Grammmerly is pouring data out of their company, and what's worse is that nobody knows it's happening.
Lowest friction wins. Advertising is lower friction than payment.
I wouldn't pay anything for Facebook, but I'm not willing to look at their ads, either. If they don't like that arrangement, they are free to start returning '403 Forbidden' anytime they like.
But this would mean advertisers would have to trust websites to actually show their ads, without direct feedback from the client side. And historically, there have been MANY scams of this nature, so websites can't choose to do this, it would trigger the "I'm being scammed" alert in advertisers.
Why ? Because a LOT of advertisements are also scams. And of course, scammers (advertisers) are really, really sensitive to getting scammed themselves.
Everyone has known for years that Facebook tracks everything they do. Facebook hasn't really tried to hide that fact. The silent majority chose to use it anyway because whatever benefits they get outweigh the loss in privacy. I am in that majority, and the last thing I need is some vocal minority second-guessing my choice.
I don't think the organization hosting the forum, should be parsing my content submission and inserting your ad while sharing my info.
And it’d be pure naïveté to think the government wouldn’t take advantage of such systems to monitor and target activists and dissidents. The mere existence of such finely targeted ads is a threat.
In general most big advertisers don't really really care about your name, address, email, phone, IP etc and generally take pains to see such data doesn't enter analytics datasets.
They do care about demographics and interests in an anonymized manner because face it, showing a sanitary napkin ad to a guy is typically neither going to be liked by the guy, nor is it a good use of the advertisers money which belongs to its shareholders.
In general outside the walled gardens tech stacks are setup in a way that you cannot ever be personally identified.
Having read about things like Operation Mockingbird [1], I can't imagine that these agencies have stopped behaving as such. Google and FB alone have got to be a treasure trove for them.
It seems like there's not much I can do about either one of these concerns, so on most days I just try not to let them suck my time up by worrying about them.
That said, I must admit that ads on Facebook/Twitter/etc are also rarely relevant for me.
This is true, but product categories were also a lot more generic and "one-size-fits-all" as a result. What targeted advertizing allows is for stuff that isn't lowest-common-denominator to find its audience.
There are trade-offs, of course, and I think Facebook and modern Ad Tech's business models are based more on megalomania and hyper optimizing around bad metrics (an organizational grey-goo scenario) than actually helping services find their audience.
The random suggestions out there saying Facebook could theoretically charge users $5/month for zero ads is naive I think.
Also, a general point about surveys... Asking people about hypothetical payments usually overestimates what they would actually do with real money. Surveys asking factual questions like "how many children do you have?" yield more accurate results than "would you pay $9 for product X?"
E.g. the article says 25% would pay $6/month for no ads. Probably the more realistic answer is to divide that by 10 and estimate that only 2.5% would actually pay that subscription amount to Facebook.
[1] https://www.tune.com/blog/mobile-ads-70-of-smartphone-owners...
That is so much higher than I thought it would be.
If/When 77% of its users leave Facebook, a substantial portion of the remaining 23% would be less inclined to pay for using the service.
Maybe it would be worthwhile to explore a freemium model where a certain amount of storage (photos, videos, text) is free but beyond it costs. Or it could be interesting to turn FB into a sort of MMORPG where certain activity costs or credits in some way. Without changing its path FB set to follow MySpace.
Now for a heavy user, I could see the appeal of paying to remove adds (ads between & injected in videos seems annoying) but I highly doubt that the math would checkout for FB. These users are the most engaged ones and probably make for the bulk of their ads revenue. They'd be foolish to offer them a small $5/m membership and lose all ad revenue from them.
All that to say: Since the low value customers are probably unwilling to pay and the high value ones would need to pay a lot to make up for ad revenue loss, I don't believe there ever will be a successful pay to remove ad model on Facebook.
I may be willing to pay some nominal amount of money for a service that fulfills Facebook's ostensible mission of "connecting people" (however vague that is). This would probably have wound up looking a lot more like Facebook's original iteration, which was functionally just a personal homepage and message board.
A service that made it free to view, like, and share content but charged a fee on the order of a postage stamp to post stuff (up to a certain amount of stuff) would probably have much less reach, but a way way waaaay higher signal to noice ratio. I'd happily pay $0.45 cents to send a party invitation or share a photo album to a service like that assuming we don't have some race-to-the-bottom situation where nobody will pay.
It didn't have to be this way but most of tech jumped onto this bandwagon—or maybe the data brokers and ad tech types magnified their snake oil benefits just enough to fuel this beast.
The issue is so much larger than Facebook. It's good to see it get attention though.
What does this mean? FB gets paid on average this amount per user / month? Users on average spend this amount following an advert presented by FB? Something else?
The average user makes Facebook something like $21 a year. That’s like $1.75 a month, which would give you $0.70 after their 60% take.
70 cents. Not even a dollar. Not even including taxes yet. After taxes you are likely making something like 52 cents.
If you are that pressed for money, I recommend Mechanical Turk. You will make in an hour what Facebook makes you in a year. Or be a panhandler, you will make even more.
Sure Facebook could charge me to come into their store, but does anyone really believe they will stop pickpocketing my digital wallet?
They might eliminate ads at first, before one day allowing a few select ads from select partners to appear again. They will still be collecting data to monetize another way.