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Comment by maxwellito | Hacker News Reader

It sounds great, sadly I think Facebook can generate much more by showing you advertising.

Yeah currently $164 a year for a US user and growing [1]. What percentage of users would be willing to pay $13.67 a month? Probably not very many unfortunately. It's an order of magnitude more than what OP said he would to pay

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

$13.67/month for a tool that includes chat, voice/video calling (accessible from any platform), social networking, the ability to maintain a page for yourself or business (equivalent of a blog/web hosting), near-unlimited cloud storage for photos and videos both on Facebook and Instagram (and probably a lot more features that I'm forgetting) is an absolute bargain.

But isn't the user paying that indirectly, anyway? (I mean somebody is paying that $164)

True, but couldn’t Facebook make money other ways?

Eg build new products that work with Facebook and sell them.

An ethical Facebook may find it could enter new markets.

A very small percentage would actually buy one and it would be very good PR. It would almost be a marketing expense at that point.

It's definitely more than 1-2 dollars, but not so high that subscriptions would be too expensive for users.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/03/facebooks-average-revenue-pe...

Although the average revenue per user who would be willing to spend $7/quarter is probably much higher (these users are disproportionately likely to have disposable income which probably makes them more attractive to advertisers)

I think nobody would mind advertisers being able to target to "subscribers". What people don't want is the ability of advertisers to target "white male who works at ACME, lives in north Fairview and bought a car last week" (which might narrow it down to just you).

That said, I definitely believe that collecting subscription money would not stop them from trying to collect data about you, for advertising purposes. They'd view subscription as just a new revenue stream (yay!).

It's like cable tv has come full circle... you pay for tv without ads, then they start having ads.

Facebook will never stop collecting data on its users as long as it exists.

If Facebook were to charge just $1/month, I'd be willing to bet they'd still lose 80% of their users, at which point, the value would be decreased enough for the remaining 20% most of them would leave too.

Sure, but then they should at least give me the choice of matching the "lost" ad money as a subscription. At Facebook scale we are talking about millions of users, who would probably choose that path instead.

Also, can you imagine the money saved by removing all the teams and infra dedicated to ads and data collection.

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