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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

> On the flip side, FB should offer a paid ad-free version of their services but who honestly would pay $10/mo for FB + Instagram etc.?

IIRC they don't make anywhere near $10/user/month. If you gave me the option to pay, say, $25/year for ad-free, tracking-free, and it was implemented in some way that I could trust, then I might be willing to participate with FB again. I'm hoping, actually, that someone will come along with exactly this business model so that we can have social networking for friends and family without the dark patterns. Needs to get everyone on board, of course, which is the hard part.

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There's an adverse selection issue. Let's say you make $10/month/user from ads, and offer the option to pay $10/month to not have ads. Users with less money are less likely to take you up on that, and are also less valuable as an advertising audience, so you start bringing in much less per month per ads-only user.

Advertising effectively allows a company to charge richer users more, which you lose when you switch to a flat fee.

That is an angle I had not considered, thanks!

It seems like a chicken & egg problem, in some ways. A business that was built more traditionally than a unicorn could still make good money at $10/user/month, certainly it's possible to build Facebook-level social networking without employing nearly as many developers as they do. But without the network effect, the value is not there. I don't want to pay to be by myself.

Maybe it could work as a SaaS, selling distinct social FB-style closed social networks to families, with a future option to interconnect those.

Probably someone has already tried this and failed. I'm not an idea guy, just a coder ;-)

I think app.net (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net) tried that approach and failed to get traction.

I view it kind of like Craigslist. If I put something there for free tons of people are interested. If I charge even a dollar the interest drops by a magnitude.

Some ex FB employees did make this. It was on techcrunch in the past 1 year, I think. Just found it, it shut down.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/30/fabric-offers-an-alternati...

https://medium.com/@fabric.me/sunsetting-the-fabric-app-deb2...

They generate ~$100 ARPU on US users.

https://digiday.com/marketing/facebooks-making-money-per-use...

Well, that's better than I remember :-). Or I'm thinking worldwide average. I'd probably still do it if the software was good enough and the network complete enough.

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