What do you guys think?
I personally have a 100% no-corporate-propaganda rule. No logos on anything where avoidable, no ads allowed on my network, etc. If ads slip through ad blockers & I notice an ad somewhere I place the advertised product or company on a 'never buy' list.
No-one other than Facebook has any benefit to gain by forcing ads on me, and frankly in the very unlikely circumstance that people do manage to damage Facebook by circumventing its propaganda platform, so much the better. I'd very much like to see it driven out of business (wild fantasy, I know).
Except, evidently, allow users to pay money to not be subjected to ads.
Let me pay for the services I use, with believable guarantees that my data is not used or sold in any way by the service provider. And regulate the cost to be a reasonable margin over production costs of these services. Hosting my hosting my posts and photos should not be that expensive.
If it can be scraped and stored, FB will do it just because. And then apologize if caught, but keep storing it. Because why not? They figure, if it can be stored, someone is doing it. They can take every advantage they can get for their “friends you may know...” and user retention.
Currently they do it because they assume there’s a correlation between the extents to which they violate your privacy and revenue. If the revenue is locked static then this breaks down and the incentives change.
There are no ads in GSuite mail.
So you take the fraction of people who will do that and see if it's worth building. Answer: it's not worth it for practically anyone. It's like building a Bitcoin integration. Everyone "would buy if it would accept Bitcoin" but come on, no one is actually in that narrow space of utility where the difference in buying is adding Bitcoin or not.
If you guys build software maybe you'll see it yourself. Go ahead and try it. Maybe one in five hundred of you will see positive results.
I do not claim that it would be good business from big tech. Vice versa. That's why they would need to be regulated to offer that. To me, it would not even matter if it was pretty much nobody using that paid service. Just having the option would be important.
GSuite is, quite famously, not equivalent to Google's consumer offerings except for ads. It's an enterprise targeted service with some extra enterprise features but delayed, if any, access to lots of features that go to the consumer versions.
Plus, the consumer versions of many of the pieces in GSuite also don't have ads.
So, it's really not a good barometer for how many people would swap out an ad-infested service for an otherwise-equivalent paid ad-free service.
It was a pretty great idea and I can't remember what it was called, but it's no longer around as far as I can tell.
Something like that on any ad supported platform would be pretty neat.
I've heard it mentioned here and there, seems like it shut down in 2016 and restarted in 2017.
Please back this up with some actual numbers, because they're not as high as you're making people believe they'd be.
I am happily paying for YouTube Premium just because I don't get interrupted by ads. In India, their premium costs less than $2 per month. That price is very justifiable for me (And their ARPU is ~$9/yr btw, so they are making 2 times as much from me than they were before by showing me ads).
According to this site (https://www.statista.com/statistics/234056/facebooks-average...), Facebook had an ARPU of $25 (average, higher per user in US and EU, lower in APAC) per year in 2018. Which is $2 per month. If they promise no ads (and associated tracking), I will pay three times that amount each month.
I think a lot of us on HN would be willing to pay these prices to support the ad-supported services we use if the option was available (and the pricing was reasonable).
So you're paying to remove ads but tracking and monetisation is still happening.
A quick search claims FB's annualized average ad revenue per user for 2018 was just under $25[0]. If I got value out of FB (I used to be a regular user, but now I just have the account for event invitations and otherwise never check it), I would absolutely pay $25/year to be able to use it without ads.
I suspect FB is near the top end for how much ad revenue they're able to extract from people; I imagine most sites are sub-$1 (certainly sub-$5), and could price subscriptions accordingly.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/234056/facebooks-average...
Only a small subset of users can/would afford to pay $25/yr for Facebook, and these users are arguably the most valuable to advertisers. Therefore by letting them skip ads, FB would lose out on more than $25/yr/user.
It might be profitable at something like $1,000/yr, but who would pay that?
And besides, there's always a number that works out to a break-even point. Maybe it's above $25/yr, but suggesting it's as high as $1000/yr is absurd. Even if it's $100/yr, I'd still bite (not for FB, but for a site I'd actually get use out of to the degree that many people do with FB). Sure, that further reduces the pool of people who could/would pay, but it'd still be an available option for some people.
It's impossible to reach a workable compromise with the advertising industry. They don't care about our convenience and would place ads under our eyelids if they could get away with it. The truth is we're way past the point of peaceful negotiation with the advertising industry. Better to unconditionally block everything and hope they go bankrupt.
Besides, making users pay money to avoid ads is just insulting. Blockers exist because of the sheer amount of abuse they perpetrate in order to serve their useless noise. People should not have to pay extortion money in order to avoid the abuse. The abuse should simply not happen in the first place.
Why do we care what advertisers want? Use regulation to force ad-funded companies to allow people to pay the average revenue per user to opt-out of ads and forbid using the fact they’re paying as a signal to raise prices.
Why should the government care what users want? How much money are users going to pay for lobbyists to lobby for this regulation you desire? None, of course. But advertisers will happily pay lots of money to lobby congresspeople to keep the laws advertiser-friendly.
There's a reason Instagram Influencer and YouTuber are, despite the sniggering of many people, real jobs that earn tons of money for those skilled in plying the craft.
I'm currently in the Philippines and a lot of businesses don't have their own web sites and just have Facebook and Instagram pages.
I just browse Facebook without logging in but it has a huge dialog asking me to log in.
Of course there are exceptions to the rule but most people are not IG Influencers and Youtubers so opting out of these social media services are not as painful.
Treats.
Not just a class of food but a brand for gas stations to sell food.
The only winning move is not to play. But they've created an environment where you pretty much have to.
Every tool available should be used to fight Facebook's world takeover plans, including Ad-blocking aggressively. In cases where it's not practical to entirely avoid Facebook the most ethical option is to aggressively block all their monetization paths so as not to further their dangerous expansion ambitions.
Maybe I'd have less of a problem with their ads if they actually took responsibility for what they're pushing and cleaned up any eventual mess (like promoting weight loss scams or outright illegal services).
There are plenty of cases where a person believes it's in their best interest to use a product, yet still criticizes it because some aspects of the product are hostile to them. It would be most effective to stop using the product, but sometimes, the criticism alone makes a difference.
I disagree with the parent comment's statement (that a person should agree with the company's practices if the person uses their product). Disagreeing with hostile practices is better than agreeing to them, even if the person continues to use the product.
So, they can do what they want within the law, so far as I care. I only get annoyed when people engage in hostile behaviour on the public internet - resources that we're meant to freely read, share links to, or index, or process in whatever way we choose.
As far as I can tell, facebook do quite a good job of keeping their walled garden well controlled and secure. I barely see anything of their website, but others are willing to jump through hoops just to be in there (e.g. sending in copies of passports). You know, these people will put up with quite a lot of abuse.
I don't use Facebook for this reason.
They trick you - you trick-em back.
If you don't like how a company uses ads (regular, spammy, deceptive), no better way than tell them than by not giving them any traffic at all.
Facebook is free to charge for the service.
No, it's not free. Facebook makes money off data from its users.
""Facebook has chosen to give the content out for free BY SERVING ADS".
The internet/web is not FOR businesses.
Perhaps that's the fundamental difference in perspective about who's responsibility it is to make allowances for who serves/receives content...
They are wasting CPU hours and man hours on obfuscation features rather than real value to the end user. But nothing is really wrong with that, it's just a bit silly. If they think it makes them more profit overall than actually enhancing Facebook, they can take that bet. (I think it's the wrong bet, but they can still take it)
I see the internet as a bunch of servers talking to each other. Some make requests to others, some respond to those requests by sending content.
You can block me, you can choose to not send or respond data to my requests, and you can send your website/content in some form that's better suited to Perl golf or the obfuscated C contest. That's your prerogative.
On my end, I get to decide who I send my requests to, how I spend my time and attention, and what I do on my machine with incoming requests and data.
Make your site bad enough, and I (and others) will stop going, and eventually you'll likely sow the seeds of your own destruction (as people move away and create competition), but fundamentally that's your call to make.
Just like its mine to ignore you or your requests that I talk to your affiliated servers, edit and filter the content once it's on my machine/infrastructure, and not pay attention to the nonsense you send.
In fact, I can think of how this could work on a large scale. A site can sign up to the adblock service to receive a prorated portion of revenues that individual subscribers pay in, and subscribers have a browser button where they can rate the site (thumbs up, neutral, or thumbs down) for usefulness. That rating can then be fed into a trainer for a search engine so that search results are tuned to that user's preferences (along with a user profile that gets automatically built up, or that a user can adjust themselves). For extra bonus points, the user can get a 10% discount on the service for agreeing to allow the adblock service to monetize that data (and agreeing to their data sharing policy) -- otherwise that data is used only to influence search results.
BTW, for years I didn't bother with an ad blocker until I started getting repeatedly hit with malware served up by the ad networks. For that same reason I don't bother with an ad blocker on my phone, because so far I haven't gotten hit with ad-delivered malware on my phone or tablet yet.