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Comment by samschooler | Hacker News Reader

Looking at their average revenue per user. Even with the break down into regions, US users (the most premium users according to the report) make $25/year. I would easily pay $100/year for tracking free, advertising free Facebook.

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I see people say things like this a lot on HN ("I would easily pay X for Y, if it meant no advertising"), and I worry that we are a bit of a self selecting population with the means for such things.

Imagine you have family with 4 kids. Are you actually going to spend $600/year on facebook?

Also, I wonder if the people who _wouldn't_ pay for a subscription are just quieter? And finally, would you really want to be on facebook if it lost half of its user base because that half didn't want to pay?

It's the "I'd buy that on a t-shirt" problem. People who say it don't usually mean it, and the few who do aren't worth the trouble of making it available.

You are looking at the average. What if the ones willing to pay $100/year are those worth more than $100/year.

Yep. Just having the $100 disposable income for a social media site means you have disposable income for other things that advertisers would love to pay to show you.

Me too. I'm not sure if I could trust FB not to track though. I'd always feel like they would collect anyways, "anonymize", and build a profile for users who opt into the paid service. For "internal" use of course. In fewer words, I simply don't trust FB, and I'm not sure if there's a good system to audit their data collection behaviours.

Law of averages... The distribution might be such that the kind of user willing and able to pay $100 a year for a social network is worth a lot more than $100 a year to advertisers.

No matter how you slice it, the ad supported model might just be a better flywheel than subrsciption based one.

You're looking at that wrong. That's $25 for just the quarter. They'll cross over $100 per user this year for the US & Canada. For Q4 it was $26.76 for that combined region, for example.

I don't think that's correct. They must report yearly revenue per user quarterly.

It is correct, they generated $26 per user in the US and Canada in Q417. There's 185m daily active users in the US and Canada, driving $20+ billion in sales for 2018.

The US + Canada market generates 3x the revenue per user versus the EU, and 10x the per user revenue of Asia Pacific.

Here's the Q4 reporting:

"But most of Facebook's money still comes from users in the U.S. and Canada, where that number is even higher: $26.76 per user."

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/31/facebook-earnings-q4-2017-ar...

And here's a break-out on the regionals for past Q4 reports:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...

That's almost 30 cents per day per user!

Even if only 5% of your friends were on it?

That's a leading question. It could (in theory) be possible to come up with a plan that tracks and advertises to free users while letting people pay to maintain some privacies.

This creates a two tiered society in the future. Kind of Dystopian feeling.

what? That's just a freemium model.

This is a joke, right?

Heh, I guess I should have been more elaborate. It was half sarcastic, half philosophical. I was just imagining a future where resources/money only matter to purchase privacy and most essential needs are taken care of. Instead of rich poor, what if the future is those with privacy and those with out, or some shade of that? Maybe it will always be science fiction, but we live in an increasingly monitored world and that power could easily be turned on citizen.

It’s a great model for the users. The fact that it hasn’t seen significant adoption makes me think that it’s not viable one, though. If you think about it, advertisers would put much lesser value on the free tier users, so the free tier will collapse.

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