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Comment by scolson | Hacker News Reader

So wait... In the US, my "value" to facebook is about $100 a year? (~24/q rounded up)

Can I subscribe to facebook and opt out of all advertising and any data sharing exposure with third-parties? That is totally worth $8-10/mo to me.

Edit: I get it. You don't like this idea, or you don't think it will work, or you don't think facebook's investors will like it (full disclosure: I am one). Why on earth should that stop me from putting my obviously flawed opinion out there that I am sick of being the product and I'd love to opt out of that process?

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Since you are willing to pay $100/year not to see ads, you are probably the sort of person who is worth much more than $100/year to Facebook and its advertisers.

Wait, care to elaborate? I'd assume it's the other way around; people who don't want to see ads are probably less likely to click on them and drive revenue, no?

He's in a financial position to afford $10 a month for the relative luxury of not being served ads, meaning he has a relatively large disposable income, meaning he's the kind of person I would want to advertise to.

Ah gotcha, yeah that makes sense.

In addition, his disposition for avoiding ads likely means he is running ad blocking, and thus already minimizing his ad exposure. This presents a less crowded field where any ads he does see may have a larger impact on his buying behavior.

The problem is that the rev/user isn't constant. If they get more users, they earn more from each user. And conversely, if they lose users, they earn less from everyone. So even if a small percentage of their users opted to pay monthly, that would have a negative impact on facebook's earnings on the remaining population.

Exactly. An individual user isn't worth a lot, the network is.

I don't think that's what that number means. If you paid that value in dollars, then Facebooks revenue-tie-to-network effects is gone. Facebook currently has the ability to 'innovate' on the data you provide and presumably convince investors that the value will rise over time due to Facebook's own engineering talent. On the other hand, if you are paying a flat fee, the entirety of Facebook's business model falls flat - that it can increase that value without you knowing. Could Facebook survive a price increase from subscriptions at $10/month to $100/month? Probably not. Could Facebook engineer another 10x return on your data? Probably.

So no, you can't subscribe. It wouldn't work.

I'd flip it around. What if Facebook paid me $$ to use it? Perhaps they could have different incentive tiers in exchange for sharing additional info.

I thought that was the end game originally - reward users with cash for self providing information companies usually need to pay survey companies to get.

Why pay users when they give it to you for free?

Why does Facebook spend money on employees then?

Presumably Facebook employees would work else where if they weren't paid.

My point was that what people aren't giving their info to Facebook for free, Facebook has to spend money on their employees to create something which people then want to use resulting in them getting information.

They do pay you ... in kind. They built a way to share photos, send messages, etc etc

Funny, my only problem with this comment is the edit itself.

Yeah I can't see anyone saying he can't put his opinion out there.

Well I think about 50-100 million users in world would be looking to have paid account. Since those are valuable customers who would definitely not want to have invasive, tracking advertisements and advertisers definitely want to target them. The only way it would work is if FB totally does away with advertising.

With current numbers the way it could work is if those users make annual commitment of at least 500-1000 USD or 200-400 dollars / quarter.

So the users with loud ethical voice and concerns about negative affects of advertising can save the world from this whole tracking business by committing about 1000 dollars a year.

> I am sick of being the product and I'd love to opt out of that process

You can opt out. Don't use Facebook.

That's only possible once shadow profiles no longer exist.

Don’t worry about shadow profiles. CCTV cameras already document you just fine.

Your "value" to facebook is going up at 25% per year.

In 5 years, it should be $24-30/month

And in 50 years it should be $2.3M/month. Unless this growth isn't sustainable...

It won't sustain 25% annual growth for 50 years.

But the advertising market is enormous (see Google's growth in the past 5 years) and Facebook has a lot of room to grow its share.

The problem for Facebook is that it is really not worth that much for many users. Even if they charge $10/year many would dump it.

I get many/most prefer to be the product than the customer. I, however, would love the option to switch.

Have you also considered that the users who would love the option to switch for $100 may be worth much more to them?

I guess it wouldn't hurt to give options. I think Google has given this option for their ad network... I wonder how many people subscribe to that.

To the best of my understanding, you can opt out of personalized ads with google, but not all ads. At least for the search product.

For email, one can pay for their google apps tier, which doesn't have ads, but it is obviously targeted to business users, so the value prop is completely different anyway.

> To the best of my understanding, you can opt out of personalized ads with google, but not all ads. At least for the search product.

You can install uBlock Origin in all your devices.

One of these things is not like the other...

Feel free to start your own Facebook clone and charge $100 a year for no ads and see how successful that is.

As ridiculous as that sounds, does it really cost $100 per user per year to build a Facebook clone?

I don’t think you risk much data exposure now.

That’s, assuming that you are not using AirBnB, Uber or Tinder.

What if you could sell the data to a third party for $10+ dollars? (I’m working on a project to do this )

Also, you would need your friends to opt out too? Or at least turn on timeline review.

It seems paradoxical to share your information and also require it to be private .

Personally, I would not sell access to my data.

Re friends opting out, no, you would just need the system to exclude individuals who have the opt-out attribute from the graph search. But I do also have timeline review turned on and have for years.

I get that I am probably a minority user of Facebook, in that I have very customized security and privacy settings. To me, there has always been value in choosing with whom to share certain information. It isn't a global binary function.

My reasoning about the opt-out attribute not being followed would be if you are friends with someone else and they share information about you wouldn't you want that information to be private? Or would you just prefer to use the timeline review feature for all of your friends content that they would share.

What if you weren't tagged properly also and your friends share information about you? Then hypothetically your information would be available on Facebook.

Thanks for answering my questions!

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