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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

I'm honestly not sure we've proven that. All this experiment shows is 96% of people want something for free (without ads) and 4% of people feel bad about taking something for free.

I don't want the tracking either, but not badly enough to stop using the free services I get.

I think most people probably actually feel this way, but I don't have data to back my assertion.

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96% of people want something for free, sure; but these are iPhone users, so they’ve already paid extra money for a premium product.

At the moment you can't really pay for Facebook. A fair experiment would be for FB to launch a premium version with no ads/spying for a monthly fee equivalent to their average revenue per user in that country and see how many people sign up.

The problem with that is that the premium users then become a more valuable ad target, and the free users less valuable. So you have to charge even more making them even more valuable. Eventually you reach some equilibrium. But by this point the premium users are such an attractive ad target that the platform eventually starts sneaking in an occasional ad, and then more frequently etc…

Cable TV used to be ad free when it started out.

HBO is probably the best counterexample, but if you look at what they’re doing with HBO max, even they might not be able to resist forever.

In my opinion regulation should be implemented to explicitly forbid using someone's willingness to pay to raise prices but that's besides the point here - my point is that until Facebook offers a paid version at a reasonable price (and I think current average revenue per user would be reasonable) it would be misleading to say that people have chosen and prefer free with ads/spying over paid when the paid option simply doesn't exist.

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