Article is behind a paywall.
Going from the title: How took it Meta this long to invent a reasonable offering for their EU market?
I'm not a Meta user, but I'd gladly pay a subscription for whatever online service offers me most.
Going from the title: How took it Meta this long to invent a reasonable offering for their EU market?
I'm not a Meta user, but I'd gladly pay a subscription for whatever online service offers me most.
If it means that platforms like Facebook start thinking about not losing paying users—as opposed to their current users, advertisers—then they just might start implementing features users want (like proper API or custom third-party clients that interoperate with other platforms—which would become completely fine once ads are off the table).
It’d be a gigantic paradigm shift—suddenly their product is their paying customer!—so it’s understandable that they would rather sit comfortably in the middle of the double-sided platform that demotes users to the role of cattle eyeballs and makes it impossible to leave, because no competitor can compete with a free offer.
However, if they do pull it off well, I have to admit I might actually sort of (never thought I’d write anything like that) applaud Facebook. I would also applaud EU for steering FB into that model—they could do much worse (such as require FB to stay free but regulate it to the T, like a cushy state-adjacent monopoly).
Sure, some people will not be willing to shell out 10 EUR monthly and leave—which is utterly fine because this, ladies and gentlemen, is how you get healthy market with finally some competition.
Do you see being able to afford a different mobile/Internet plan or own a different car as unnecessarily stratifying society? Would you rather everyone had the same government-mandated thing?
It doesn’t mean everyone will choose something for their income bracket, either. Maybe you can afford Meta’s $10/mo, but still go for the $1 sub because you don’t think the extra fluff is worth $9.
> I don't have a lot of faith in interopability mixing well with profit incentives
Network effects only work when you have a free product, and free product means being sponsored by another side of the double-sided market (e.g., advertisers) or by the government. When you don’t have a free product, network effects are out of the equation and there’s no “all my friends are there so I will be too”. You have services competing for users. To retain users, you would have to implement features they want. Users will obviously demand interoperability, on their terms, or leave to the next competitor who will offer it.
> A lot of socializing has moved to giant private group chats, I don't particularly want to segregate by income more.
Exactly. Facebook, Discord group chats. Now if we follow the money, they have an incentive to lock users & data in precisely because of the above. Free products, sponsored by something external (advertisers, investor money), that created a habit and entitlement in people that they don’t need to pay for a service. Someone always pays, and if it’s not you then you should probably be concerned who pays for you and why.
(There is a separate problem, in that interesting conversations might happen in more exclusive groups due to commercial LLMs crawling the web and ignoring copyright robbing people of the usual incentives for open information exchange—street cred, fame—but that’s a different conversation.)
> Vc funding eating the entire market before being left to wonder how to sustain itself is a seperate problem from the ad-driven model itself imo.
It’s an adjacent problem. The reason free products were possible in the first place is investors letting them burn money to attract users with a free offer, and then bait-and-switch them into becoming a product. This is subverting how the market is supposed to work. A paid service is, ideally, the opposite of that.
Would you have read the article if it was free with ads and trackers? There's your answer. Few people will pay for this.
Actually actually: I'd be happy to pay for a subscription service to news in the same fashion I pay for Spotify. The only reason I don't go the extra mile to subscribe to their paid offerings is because every major news outlet is trying to get me to subscribe individually. Which means I need to track subscriptions individually.
I could manage subscriptions through Apple News, but I get a reduced offering when going through Apple.
Seriously, someone just invent Netflix for news subscriptions already.
Like no. Someone invent Spotify or Netflix for news/print already ffs.