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Comment by pietroglyph | Hacker News Reader

Why not just make it $10/mo or ads?

Because the people who are most valuable to show ads to are also the most likely to be be willing to pay $10/mo to not see ads.

Some are likely far over that threshold. However, I doubt everyone willing to pay 10$/month is worth more on average.

Facebook makes $7 per month per user in the US and Canada. So, it's likely fairly close though.

But it doesn't matter if you lose money on those people. The $10/month easily carries all costs even if 0.1% of users pay and the rest gains them zero. (At least, back when I did the math in ~2015, when they were probably a bit smaller than they are now.)

Facebook alone makes $23 per user (from US/Canada) per month so it probably should rather be $50 than $10 per month.

It's per quarter I think.

I pay for Spotify and Google Play. If either one of them starts showing me ads, they're gone. It's not me I'm worried about at this point. It's my kids.

I believe that was one of the questions Zuck got asked in Congress - why not make paying for FB (and it's subsidiaries) optional in exchange for an ad free, non-data harvesting experience. I get it that many people want the service free and that expense needs to be recouped, but it would be nice to have the option. Perhaps it should even be a legal requirement to have the option.

I think YouTube has something like this (in the US) where you can pay monthly for an ad-free experience?

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