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Comment by kevinventullo | Hacker News Reader

There’s a sense in which free ad-supported apps are “redistributive”. Whether you’re rich or poor, Facebook costs the same and the experience and features you have access to are identical. Effectively, the rich users are subsidizing the app for the poor users (the rich users’ eyeballs being worth much more). I personally view that as a strong upside compared to paid models.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. What does paid social media look like? Perhaps more like traditional media: only deep pockets will have access to “virality” and wide distribution. I could certainly see a market for that with the Instagram crowd.

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> the rich users are subsidizing the app for the poor users

That would only hold if the majority of paid ad placements on a social media site targeted rich people. As is evident by the ads that appear surrounding elections, the ads targeting average people to dump their savings into crypto and all of the gambling (might as well be gambling...) gaming ads that doesn't seem like a safe assumption to make although I have no data to support either assumption.

It is well established that the ARPU from richer demographics (income levels, countries etc) is much higher than that from poorer ones. The redistributive effect is real, though perhaps there may be other ways (e.g. reparations) that have less harmful side effects.

DuckDuckGo has advertisements and is profitable. Nothing about the free-ad model for apps requires tracking users.

Search ads you don’t need user targeting. You target on the search term and most likely it will be relevant for the user. Only standard display ads need targeting to be able to show relevant ads to the user.

Content based ads still seem valuable. If I am on Don’s how to fix something pages, then add for something fixing tools seem possible to sell without involving my data

There's always the context of the page on which the ad will appear. If I search for "teach your kid how to read", the search engine can display ads based on the query and the destination page seems like it should show the exact same types of ads.

How would the destination page know the exact type of ads to show, other than getting some info from the search engine? And wouldn't that be tracking?

There are non-tracking ad networks that will analyze the content of the page and insert relevant ads.

I totally agree with you. I wouldn't necessarily say that rich people subsidize poor ones, other one we wouldn't see Facebook racing for Brazil and Google racing for India. But yes, one major property of ads is how it adapts to the user's revenue.

I believe that anyone who wants to take on ads, need to understand this first. And to accomplish an ad-free realk, one needs to somehow have people pay differently based on their incomes. And I can't see any way without tracking on how to do that.

One company who managed to do that, to some extent, is Netflix. Their price range from 3$/month (lowest tier in India) to 20$/month (highest tier in France), for pretty much the same service. It's still only one order of magnitude of adaptation. While ads scale from pretty much 0 (poor people who can "mis"spend only 5$/month), to I think maybe 100$ for some clicks.

Basically, from my point of view, ads are a way to raise money based on what people can give, while removing the free-rider problem that doing it directly would raise. Can we make a useful crypto money that fixes this? (you're allowed to a big computation budget, since ads have a very expensive global budget)

This is something I thought about too. The dilemma for Facebook and Twitter to offer paid service is interesting

Wealthy eyeballs worth more (a lot). Wealthy people most likely to pay to not see ads. A super high price to justify not showing ads to wealthy people will make the whole offering moot.

I don't have the numbers but if it's anything like the rest of the economy, top 10% is probably spending something like 60% of total spent. So removing the top 10% from the targetable population for ads can be a huge hit to ad revenues.

In the past, we had paid social media (kind of) with services like CompuServe, AOL, etc.

People tended to self-segment by demographics. Also, there was more than one network to choose from, since things were segmented by which internet connection you had. (This was also the heyday of BBS’s and Usenet, which probably wasn’t a coincidence.)

Maybe having N vertically integrated communities with different norms is better than what facebook, twitter, etc built via their horizontally-integrated services.

Most (all?) prior mediums were initially pay to play. Print, radio, telegraph, TV, cable, fax, ATMs.

Then there's some kind of phase change. Like maybe when costs reduce enough for Metcalfe's Law to kick-in.

[I don't quite recall what some other theorists have said. Shirky's observations about cost of coordination. McLuhan's distinctions between passive and active engagement (aka push vs pull).]

Apple's privacy power play may be the first time someone manages to put the toothpaste back into the tube, for an entire medium and by extension ecosystem.

Some mediums, like rail and phones, manage to remain pay to play. Maybe there's something to be learned by compare and contrast.

Newspaper advertising never had an incentive to attack newspaper readers.

> Newspaper advertising never had the means to attack newspaper readers.

FTFY - They totally would have done it if it had been possible and profitable.

> Whether you’re rich or poor, Facebook costs the same and the experience and features you have access to are identical.

Or you can say, the amount of work that's extracted from the user is the same. Because the major "service" of social media isn't the webapp that has a feed timeline, or a fancy UI, or availability (which can be easily copied by competitors). It's the network effect that comes from user's participation. It's very possible there's a net profit for the majority of users (either from clicking the ads, or from simply using the social media), so the "subsidized" users' loss is not a primary concern here.

It's been years since there was organic viral videos... that ship sailed - we're at the point of pay for play, sex or extremely high risk/danger/endangerment content for eyeballs..

These are not the only alternatives. Messaging apps allow people to stay in touch with each other without any of the timeline corporate surveillance society nonsense.

Maybe some room in the market will be made for federated and/or nonprofit social-media?

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