Ad-free Facebook, Instagram access planned for $14 per month in Europe
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
For comparison:
My mobile plan: 35 PLN
Disney+: 29 PLN
Amazon Prime: 11 PLN
HBO MAX: 30 PLN
Netflix 4k: 60 PLN
Apple TV+: 35 PLN
Edit: indeed they are[1]
I'm not sure why they're doing that but I suspect they don't really want people to move to the paid/ad-free plan so they charge a premium for that.
I've discovered and bought many products from them and Facebook gives me a clean way to block and report ads that I think are bad.
Honestly my biggest complaint is that I'll often see something in a Facebook ad, want to buy it 2 months later and there's no way for me to look up which ads I saw on Facebook 2 months ago.
I wonder if that is an ease of use facebook thing for small marketers, better location data, or lower ad costs making it more worthwhile
i wonder, has Google ever tried showing ads that were irrelevent to your current search query, but still relevant to your purchaser profile?
that way they could surface relevant search results (keeping you coming back and showcasing their core business case), while _also_ appealing to your interests
The tech industry has been dominated by a few players who primarily gain leverage by offering services for free, preventing the entry of smaller players as well as leveraging user data in ways that people would find abhorrent. When you can charge users, you can offer social media services that don't require dark patterns and depend on user addiction to turn a profit.
ARPU source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
I doubt they’re just going to stop collecting data bc ur paying them.
From the perspective of an advertiser, I don't really see the appeal in running an ad on a platform where all the users who have signaled they have disposable income and are willing to pay for online services don't see any ads.
I'm sure there are people who aren't aware of adblockers or aren't savvy enough to use them, but how many?
Plus Meta can also change it to limited ads later and sell those for bigger money.
The average per user may be $5.96, but I imagine that the people who will pay 14 $/month have more disposable income and are therefore in the demographics that advertisers would pay a premium for.
It won't happen overnight and it won't happen if this is always a fringe use case not worth worrying about.
This also impacts some of the revenue analysis other people have posted. If Facebook makes a bit less money on someone but can cut their costs by more, Facebook can still come out ahead with a subscription. Obviously this won't be true right out of the gate because they won't be able to rely on it initially, but possibly in the future this may impact things.
I mean, after all, if you cut out the immense spend they're making to throw ads at you, how much would it actually cost to provide the "good" part of Facebook's services to an average user? It really isn't much and it continues to drop.
I've often wondered about this. A social network could be operated quite inexpensively if you didn't have to pay for sales, marketing, attention hacking, etc. (Twitter is kind of testing this hypothesis.) Social networks should be as boring and everyday as blogs and email.
Bibliogram or any other open source frontend to access public profiles.
Otherwise, just stop using Meta's products.
EDIT what's most interesting is that people from here are actually considering it to be a good deal. Paying to have your privacy "preserved" by a super shady and unethical company like Meta is not a win. You're negotiating with the devil. As others pointed out, it doesn't mention if your data will stop being sold to third parties to have personalized ads for you. In the future they might even decide that it's simply a dumb decision they took and sell people's data regardless if they paid or not; hell, they can even make it worse by adding a line to the dataset saying that you actually have money to pay for useless, placebo features like the one just announced.
I expected more of HN and not just being condescending to an unethical big tech that milks every data out of its users for a profit.
There is no magical formula in determining how much someone will pay beyond offering a price and see if anyone bites. It may turn out that $14 is too high and they will have to temper their expectations later. But maybe $14 will turn out to be just fine and people will be quite willing to spend that much.
If you are using Meta properties so frequently that you notice it has ads, it is likely that you can find more than $14 worth of value from your usage. If you can't even muster a paltry $14 worth of value from using it over the course of a month, why are you using it at all?
Also, how would they prevent people posting ads from falling through the cracks?
Also doesn’t say if FB will continue to sell your data or not if you pay the premium
Selling targeted ads = "pay us $$$ and we'll show your ads to people who match the criteria you select". This is very different from the former.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket
> The perpetrators of a protection racket may protect vulnerable targets from other dangerous individuals and groups or may simply offer to refrain from themselves carrying out attacks on the targets, and usually both of these forms of protection are implied in the racket.
> The Silicon Valley-based company has until the end of November to comply with a Luxembourg court ruling from this year which found that Facebook “cannot justify” the use of personal data to target consumers with ads unless it gains their consent. The court said companies should explore a subscription model in its ruling.
This is obviously not a serious offer, it is just so they can tell the court “I told you so.”
Facebook’s business model is not really compatible with a society that values privacy. But I don’t think anybody wants to be responsible for pointing out the incompatibility.
The GDPR says that it is not allowed that the user who denies their personal data to be stored experiences negative consequences because of that.
So in theory, behavioral advertising is dead in Europe. Because nobody would voluntarily agree to be tracked.
For some reason, many companies go the "Our service is available in two flavours: With behavioral advertising and as a paid service" route. And it seems that has not been challenged in court yet.
I wonder how it could be legal, because not having free access is a negative consequence, isn't it?
I think even in Europe the claim that any company has an obligation to serve you for 100% free, getting nothing out of it whatsoever, is not going to fly very far.
It isn't even a moral issue per se; it's just impossible. Companies need some sort of income. One can speculate on how nice it would be if that were not the case, but if it weren't we'd live in a very different world anyhow, beyond the realm of speculation (it isn't necessarily all better than ours in every way).
What do you do if a user refuses the use of their data for ad targeting? In the worst car you show them untargeted ads. Ideally you target ads on ways that don't require that user's personal data, such as being based solely on the page content.
The newspapers are blatantly violating the GDPR, and it is kind of disgusting that the DPAs are choosing to selectively not enforce the law due to political reasons (governments can't afford to be seen as being against the local media).