"do everything they can to monetize"
Except, evidently, allow users to pay money to not be subjected to ads.
Except, evidently, allow users to pay money to not be subjected to ads.
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.
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.