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Comment by jeremiahlee | Hacker News Reader

Meta’s monthly average revenue per user in Europe was $5.96 as of 2023-Q2. $14/month is quite the premium to opt out of its privacy invasion. Does Meta really think it is worth more to people than Spotify or Disney+?

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

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$6 is the average but the set of people willing to pay for add free are both the heaviest users and the ones with the most disposable income. Let’s say you offer this for $6, only the top 10% would pay for it. But the top 10% might generate $10. If you charge $10, only the top 5% would pay and they generate $12, and so on.

I wonder if creating a paid tier of users that won't see ads significantly devalues Meta's advertising proposition.

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.

Potentially these paying users weren’t the market anyway. Someone willing to pay to not see your ads maybe hostile to any brand forcing them in front of their eyeballs.

That's possible. I thought most people with that mindset would be running adblockers, so probably wouldn't be interested in paying for an ad-free experience.

I'm sure there are people who aren't aware of adblockers or aren't savvy enough to use them, but how many?

Perhaps on desktop, but (for example) an iPhone user on Instagram has no easy way to avoid being advertised to

That, and also they might expect a user who buys ad-free to be a heavier user than average.

No problem, just sell their user data for a premium so they can be advertised too in other ways. Its worth squeezing this one in many extra ways since, as you said, they've signaled they are valuable targets.

Plus Meta can also change it to limited ads later and sell those for bigger money.

Depending on the ad system and your user tracking /fingerprinting setup, you can get that information and then track the user to other places on the internet and then show ads to them there.

Nobody said anything about opting out of privacy invasion. Just that they won’t show ads on the website.

I doubt they’re just going to stop collecting data bc ur paying them.

I'd wager that 14$/month is actually really cheap given who will pay for it.

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.

I don't believe the most profitable users care about ads.

There is a high correlation between people who opt out of ads by paying and folks advertisers want to target. This creates a dilemma which increases ad load on those who don't pay to make up the difference.

To opt out of ads. The privacy invasion is still opt in and free :)

You assume that paid users are actually option out of privacy invasion. They aren’t seeing ads but that doesn’t mean Meta isn’t invading privacy to continue to build a profile if you and those who you connect with regardless of payment.

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