Meta wants to charge EU users $14/month if they don't agree to personalized ads
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
This is all really positive, and proof that these regulations are working, imo.
It's a bit more complicated, in that creating and maintaining all the payment processing infrastructure is a huge hassle to make without recouping sufficient cost per user. There's still not really a good option for microtransactions and it's a big problem.
But... There's no way on earth Facebook is making $14/mo off me in adds. It's just not even close. I'd be happy to pay if the value were anywhere close to a match, but it's just not. I mean, that's en par with streaming services and youtube. If Facebook thinks they're even in the same order of magnitude as far as content quantity and quality as that, they're delusional.
If I had to guess an actual fair value for the average user, it'd be around $3-5/mo max. For me personally, it can't be more than $1-2/mo. But maintaining all the payment infrastructure for that when any amount deters most users is pointless. Companies always price these non-free tiers really high.
We all know how this goes, where the paying customers end up even more lucrative to advertisers too.
I was happy to trade some cpu cycles for an ad free experience. I would win, the site would win, it seemed like a really nice idea.
People immediately balked at the concept though and while I have no faith in crypto or its proponents at all, it's nice to think of what could have been.
And doing it with a cpu that's not particularly efficient compared to asics.
You're better off just paying money.
14$ is more than they make off me by showing me ads. Trading CPU cycles seems more fair because it's only when I'm actually using the service.
In principle though it sounds great. If the customers pays Meta might do something that will make them happier than the advertisers. I will wait though until they actually confirm this.
One thing looks fishy though. Why only europe? If you implement this, would you not want to role it out globally? Would you not want as many paying customers as possible? This tells me potentially that they know many people will stop using the service and they will lose users so the subscription might only recover some of the loss but not the full amount.
The other thing for be is the reputation of the company. I happily pay mailbox.org for email, Bitwarden for a password manager, Mullvad for a VPN, etc. But the idea of becoming a paying customer of Meta just strikes me as icky given their reputation for being anti-privacy and anti-user. It's not really a problem for me now as I don't use Facebook but when they inevitably start charging for WhatsApp I'm not sure what I will do.
$14 a month is (to me) an astonishing figure when you see it written out. To think that just Facebook’s cut, of just the profit, of just what you’ve been manipulated to buy beyond what you otherwise would have would mean that earnestly the data suggests that the average person is likely spending well over $100 a month on things they didn’t even want in the first place because of targeted advertising.
There must be companies that spend on advertising and do not get any good return on it.
It's sort of like a race to the bottom.
With facebook I understand that if you want to actually get a message out to people who've explicitly subscribed to your content you need to pay them. Same sort of thing. Sure, it's an "ad", but not in the same sense as like a billboard or a TV spot. It's actually game-theoretic coercion.
I expect the EU in general won't stand for it though as too many people will make the 'wrong' selection.
In a voluntary society, both parties must consent to the arrangement for a user to (freely) use a service.
So for use cases where you need the user's consent because you don't have a different GDPR-valid reason for processing data (many reasonable use cases don't need consent, but user tracking for advertising generally does), that processing is permitted only if that consent is freely given i.e. willingly 'gifted'.
One way how it's implemented is that if some service if conditional upon 'consent' then there is literally no way to get 'GDPR-valid' consent - the user clicking 'I consent' to bypass a paywall doesn't count as the user consenting, and neither does signing a personalized pen&paper contract saying that the user consents to tracking in return for getting free use of some service, because that's not "freely given consent" and so it doesn't permit Meta to track that user. It's just like signing a contract where you get $10000 in return for agreeing to be enslaved for some time - your freedom is not something that can legally be sold, and so are the privacy rights.
The other way how it's implemented in GDPR is that it must be possible to withdraw consent at any time (including 5 seconds after signing up to a service) without any adverse consequences such as the service being cancelled or increasing in price. Obviously that's not a problem if the consent is freely given, but if someone tries to figure out some roundabout way of buying or trading for consent, the consequence-free cancellation makes the point that it's not supposed to work that way.
Of course, companies are not required to provide any service, and they can require a fee for some services - however what they can't do is buy 'consent' with discounts or free service; the GDPR limitations to tracking users are intended to apply to all tiers of users, no matter what Meta does or wants to do. Meta can gift users free service; users can 'gift' Meta consent to tracking, but they can't make a binding contract on that because under GDPR conditional consent is literally meaningless and worthless.
Is that actually illegal? Or am I missing a difference with what you're describing?
The other is that GDPR is still 'enforcement-limited', and there are many organizations that simply violate GDPR - the fact that some organization has done something for years and has not yet been forced to change their ways does not imply that what they do is permitted by GDPR; it's just that the enforcement of GDPR for the trickier parts like online services (as opposed to the important services in physical world, employment, real estate and renting, banking, telecommunications, medicine, etc which were prioritized and are now highly compliant) is starting with the larger violators like Meta, other companies would be handled afterwards, and since news companies are 'politically sensitive' I'd expect that lemonde.fr would be among the very, very last on the regulator's list.
You can't go "Ads + Tracking" or "No Ads + No Tracking" there are 4 options not 2.
Facebook's issue might just be that their entire ad platform is instead built around personalized ads. Revamping their ad network to do well with content ads might not be worth it. Especially since that would cede ground and might compel other jurisdictions to force them out of personalized ads as well.
bowl of popcorn time, for sure.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
Could the increase in ARPU over time be used as a "harm to consumer" argument in favour of antitrust action? The effective "price" of using these services is increasing.
The suggested subscription model could yet change, as it is not clear whether EU regulators will deem the new plan as compliant with EU laws.<<
extortion, is not 'giving an option'.
amazon has done this a number of times, it seems FB is following a play from MS, by copying the competition a day late and a dollar short.
Do what we say or you can't do business in Europe?
Pay for services or don't get served?
This is just financial reporters taking a random brainstormed idea out of context and misrepresenting it as a serious strategy to generate headlines and buzz.
That said, I have disposable income and always pay for ad free experiences when offered.
Anyone have experience running ads on Facebook? How is the UX?