Facebook and Instagram to Offer Subscription for No Ads in Europe
about.fb.com
about.fb.com
Meaning there is incentive to show even more ads to the ones who pay.
Elon is genuising twitter very hard :D
AFAIK there is no verification involved in the blue check purchase. It just indicates that the account holder pays some money every month.
I mean arguably you're not even paying them to not do something, you're paying them to make it easier for you to not do something, and to not complain when you refrain from doing so.
The web is weird when you try to insist on the original meaning of 'user-agent'.
It seems designed to be priced as high as possible, so that users don't choose it and they can claim no one wants it, and that they have consent.
If it was €2.99/mo, which seems much more reasonable, how many people would choose it?
yes
then they'll go back to the regulator and say "we tried, no-one was interested"
There are two values here: what percentage of people opt for the “ad-free” experience and how much FB makes per user. In fact, as long as their ad revenue per user is LESS than 12.99, this will work out net positive for them.
The only way it would be less is if the alternative is “not having Facebook”, rather than “Facebook with ads”.
The economics are even worse in US/Canada, where an MAU is worth $56.11 per quarter, or $18.70 per month.
(EURUSD is 1.06, near parity.)
They don't need to collect VAT on the revenue from the vast majority of ads (basically only ads bought by individuals, which can't be common). They would need to do it for the subscriptions, and the end-user pricing is with VAT included. That's going to be another 20-25% off.
It seems very plausible that they are making less profit from the subscribers than from the non-subscribers at these prices. The pricing might still be more than people are willing to pay, but it's not any kind of scam.
It's true that a lot of people essentially never click the ads, but it's also true that seemingly smart and educated people can be extremely dumb about these things.
https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_earnings/2023/q3/p...
And no, Facebook is not lying about those numbers.
I wouldn't expect them to be lying but there to be some data hiding in the "average" part of the ARPU. We often want the median or some other percentile, not the mean.
"We define ARPU as our total revenue in a given geography during a given quarter, divided by the average of the number of MAUs in the geography at the beginning and end of the quarter."
So that is about what I expected. I'm not going to dig into this but it could be very meaningful or extremely misleading. Interesting though.
The problem I have is trust. Ads or nit, I no longer trust Facebook to not continue violating my privacy WHILE I'm a paying customer.
The trust has been broken and without data transparency and regulations with teeth, I simply won't give them another chance.
You're right to be skeptical of companies that "believe in an ad supported Internet".
Not so long ago we learned Google's toggle to turn off your web activity history turned off your ability to see your history, not Google's collection of it:
That document goes on to state: "Contrary to Mr Pichai's Congressional testimony, the founder of Google's Privacy and Data Protection Office testified in this case that he is 'not aware of any setting' that users can employ to prevent Google from collecting data related to their app activity."
Much of the issue, allegedly, is that WAA, rather than saving data when on and not saving it when off, simply saves data in a different place – not in the Google Account data set. Addressing the confusion about the bounds of Google Accounts, Hochman said, "So I'm aware that Google may save data in different locations, depending on where that WAA/sWAA switch is set. It is still collecting the same data and still saving it, but it may save it in different places."
https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/24/google_privacy_button...
Plus now they get some good PR in Europe, and potentially more users that buy into this marketing tactic. Absolutely evil company.
Do you have a source for this claim? It's possibly true, but I suspect in reality it's actually the opposite.
A couple lines of thinking lead me to believe this:
- Why would they collect data from people who are not their users, i.e. shadow profiles? Is it really so that when people sign-up they have a better UX, or is it so they can still sell this lower quality data to whoever might find it useful?
- Showing ads to users is only profitable if the user is part of an ad campaign. Meanwhile, user data can be sold perpetually many times, even if they're not directly advertised to on FB. Why _wouldn't_ FB want to be part of this highly unregulated and lucrative market?
Believing anything these companies say publicly is too naive, given their track record of deception. So I don't mind all this being dismissed as FUD. :)
This is the easiest thing in the world to check: their quarterly earnings are public. If you don’t believe those earnings, I would suggest filing a complaint with the SEC because you would have uncovered one of the larger securities fraud cases of all time.
If I could pay for it to be sane, to actually show what my friends were up to in chronological order, to show what is around me of interest etc we might be talking.
I won't pay for this, as I use Facebook approximately once a year. I wonder what that will do to Facebook's user numbers if they choose to get rid of users like me though. I suspect the actively active userbase to be much smaller than their usual billion+ user count.
(Pre-Musk even) Twitter gave me an ultimatum about consenting to tracking across the internet or deleting my account. This is why I no longer have a twitter account.
There's no universe where I trust Zucc and Meta. They're just gonna take my money, still collect every molecule of information they can about me and anyone even slightly related to me (while building shadow profiles of the ones without an account), and probably STILL show ads, just more cleverly hidden. (not that I use FB mind you, just in a theoretical world where I did and indeed got offered to pay for FB with no ads)
I will never understand how a website/app with such a user-hostile interface can continue to thrive.
It's quite simple. You are not the customer; you are the product. The UI/UX for marketers is quite polished. The UI/UX for the users is as twisted as it needs to be to keep you around. It's like giving your dog one of those bowls that forces them to eat slower.
They also jumbled the feed so you can never return to the last thing you were looking at, unless you explicitly "Like" it and then fish through your Activity history.
If I had any assureance they would revert to the pre-2012 UI/UX I'd be tempted by this offer, but I'm not in the EU so it doesn't matter to me.
However, the EU requires a third option: Unpersonalized ads.
Facebook can't require you to pay money to have them not analyze what you do and profile you to get more money out of ads.
And everyone knows that personalized ads are worth 10x more than Unpersonalized ones.
But the problem is that a bunch of EU countries have been letting their local newspapers run the same "a subscription or consent to personalize ads" playbook from day 1 of GDPR, with no consequences for 5 years. And there is going to be a paper trail on that, whether it is newspapers that got this approved with their DPAs or it was "just" that the DPAs have been silently burying the user complaints rather than acting on them.
It's going to be quite hard for those DPAs to apply a different policy to Facebook.
But then again it is sad to see that people are actually willing to pay for such kind of content.
Now maybe they are giving me YouTube Music for free and the price would be the same without it - but it doesn't feel that way and it's enough to make me not subscribe. This kind of shenanigans is enough to drive me and probably many others away.
It's £12.99/month. Would I pay that if the bundling had never been offerered? It feels quite high - I've hit my limit of streaming services I'm prepared to pay for at the moment. I'd probably pay half that for ad-free YouTube.
Surprisingly (to me at least) I'm actually finding enough good content on TikTok to make up for the fact that I can't block ads on YouTube any more. Thus the great cycle of enshittification continues.
This is kind of a weird way to think about it. Regardless of what's packaged with it, it's either worth the money for your use or it's not.
> It's £12.99/month. ... I'd probably pay half that for ad-free YouTube.
That makes more sense. For me, it's worth it, but YouTube is my primary video entertainment source.
Yes - I fully admit that it's a weird way of thinking about it, but the psychology around pricing has a lot of this stuff. I genuinely don't know if I'm an outlier or not. Responses to pricing are rarely about rational cost/benefit analysis.
> That makes more sense. For me, it's worth it, but YouTube is my primary video entertainment source.
I have a limit to how much I'm prepared to pay for video serivces each month. If I add one, something else would have to go. So the issues with YT Premium are a mix of the bundling psychology, the indecision about giving up another service - and the competition with TikTok for (sometimes) similar content.
I cannot use local cards because of banking issues
I still won't use it for other political reasons, but at least it seems like the app isn't unusable anymore.
Imagine how different things would look if Facebook adopted a subscription model early on before they became an ad-infested pile of garbage.
Though unfortunately it won't save you from friends re-sharing content from random websites.
Factoring that people willing to pay probably skew wealthier probably skew more profitable, $10 seems about right.
But that $19 is for an average user. Paying users will presumably be your most engaged users that probably generate much more than that
So no need to factor in the adblocker people.
This is similar to collective insurance. If the rich people all self-insure and remove themselves from the pool, the viability of the collective insurance gets risked because you're only left off with the people that actually need help and nobody with a surplus to share.
For ads you get left off with a cohort of users that can't afford to pay to remove ads so can't also afford to pay for stuff advertised in said ads. Which means the ads will become more like TV ads for awareness rather than direct purchase, which will lower ad-based ARPU.
At the end of the day, you are paying 10 USD+ per month for an "ad-free experience", and still get ads because YouTube doesn't keep its promises.
And there is no excuse for that, content creators could mark when sponsored segments are starting and ending, and YouTube could skip them.
When you subscribe to YouTube for ad-free content, you're essentially paying for an uninterrupted viewing experience.
This is similar to how you'd expect no ads when you pay for a service like Netflix.
For example, imagine watching "The Matrix" on Netflix and being unexpectedly interrupted by an Oreo commercial—it would be frustrating, especially since you paid for an ad-free experience.
The issue with YouTube is that if they were to remove baked-in in-stream ads for Premium users, it might require them to compensate content creators more indirectly, which in turn could reduce Google's profits.
This creates a financial disincentive for YouTube to fully eliminate ads.
As a result, you might find be better if you use software like SponsorBlock.
This situation is paradoxical; ideally, paying customers should receive the best user experience directly from the platform, and be rewarded for that.
Technically, there is no limitation, LinusTechTips can perfectly take 1 minute to add a marker for its sponsored segments, at the moment he ticks "This video contains sponsored content".
A more truthful description for YouTube Premium could be: "Pay 10 USD / month, to remove a lot of, but not all the ads", and then you understand it's not that of a good deal.
No, I pay YouTube to not show me YouTube ads. Separately, I also pay several content creators for their content without ads. I pay the person showing me ads to stop showing me ads.
> Wouldn't you get upset if Netflix is streaming to you "The Matrix", and in the middle of it there is an advertising for Oreos?
If that ad is a part of the movie as it was shown in theatres or on other streaming services, then no, I wouldn't be upset at Netflix.
When you use YouTube Premium, you are paying the creator for each view, and they still show you the ads, and you find it acceptable ?
> If that ad is a part of the movie as it was shown in theatres or on other streaming services, then no, I wouldn't be upset at Netflix.
Sounds like you agree to pay for Spotify Premium but still get interruptions in the music.
Yes. Most (though not all) of the channels I watch don't have inline ads. For those that do, the YouTube client makes them easily skippable (tap your finger four times on the video to skip 30 seconds), but usually I just unsubscribe if they're egregious enough. I wouldn't watch LinusTechTips if he paid me :)
> Sounds like you agree to pay for Spotify Premium but still get interruptions in the music.
You seem not to understand that ads come from different sources and pay different people. Platform ads come from the platform and they pay money to the platform. Many platforms let you pay them to avoid these ads. This is what YouTube Premium is.
Separately, the content provider may also include ads in the content you are streaming on the platform. You can try to find a way to pay the content provider for an ad-less stream, but the system isn't as well set up for that situation, at least for video. Podcasts are pretty well set up for this model, and I do pay for many ad-less podcasts.
Interesting that you picked a movie series quite well known for it's product placement marketing-- I'm sure if Nabisco had been on board, the Oracle would happily have given Neo an Oreo instead of a fresh baked chocolate chip cookie.
Facebook and Instagram are none of that.
Not universally, it all depends on how one values the use/enjoyment/value that they get out of the experience, and everybody values their time/enjoyment/convenience differently.
Also will this actually improve the experince or the timeline will still be dominated by “suggested for you” and “more like that”.. etc?
I would never trust that entity anyway, even if they offered it, but curious what fraction of their haul is really the surveillance and behavioral profiling part as distinct from the placing-ads-on-a-surface part (which is how newspapers, TV and billboards operated forever).
The economics of ad-supported but non-tracking platforms is an important parameter as we contemplate what options do we have for less evil online platforms.
All social media sites should pay users to use their services in exchange for their data. The cost of them providing a service pales in comparison to the value of user data. And there's no way they're giving up that lucrative part of their business.
Make no mistake. This is not some benevolent side of FB where they're seeing the evil of their ways. This is just a marketing tactic to attract more users they can exploit.
Source? It doesn't have to sell to them directly. They can get it from their API.
> Overall FB made about $3.22 per user
It's much higher than that in the EU and US[1].
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
And that was revenue not profit. FB makes roughly 30% profits so maybe 15 dollars a year for the US?
It's literally against their own interests to, even if you think they're completely evil... Them and Google have a data monopoly, why the heck would they ever sell that monopoly? They'll charge to have access through their ad platforms, but would never sell it, even if it were legal...
There's FTC, and EU regulations that govern big tech... I'd except better from Hacker News Readers...
Really? And they keep shadow profiles out of the goodness of their hearts? That data can't be used for advertising directly, but it sure is lucrative to _somebody_.
> It's literally against their own interests
Their only interest is increasing profits, by any means necessary. Selling parts of the data they collect is not a one-time transaction, but a subscription. So it's not like they're giving away their secret sauce.
> There's FTC, and EU regulations that govern big tech...
Please, that's such a naive take. Governments have been far too slow and lenient to enact and enforce regulations, partly because they're in a symbiotic relationship with Big Tech.
Besides, the FTC regulates a minor aspect of what makes Big Tech harmful. EU leads the way in regulations, yet it's still far behind the schemes these companies pull.
> I'd except better from Hacker News Readers...
There's a downvote button you can express your dissatisfaction with. :)
It would be a good gift for older people that tend to click their way to malware.
They can eliminate the "sponsored posts" but the algorithm is still going to recommend to me all sorts of poisonous stuff for engagement. That's the real problem that I'd like to pay away - just leave me with what I follow and nothing else.
What does it matter what Facebook can sell your attention for? You own your attention.
Facebook used network effects to monopolize its audience and then switched them to ad consumers when they had the eyeballs. There is no way to launch such an ad heavy service in an upfront way.
YES. Our attention is ours. It's not theirs to sell off to the highest bidder. It's part of our cognitive functions and as such it's inalienable.
It's straight up offensive that they think they're doing us a favor by not advertising to us. Truth is advertising should be illegal.
Not a fan boy at all, far from it but have to hand it to the self driving batteries on the wheels guy - he did it with twitter and then others are moving in that direction it seems.
> The move follows years of privacy litigation, enforcements and court rulings in the EU — which have culminated in a situation where Meta can no longer claim a contractual right (nor legitimate interest) to track and profile users for ad targeting. (Although, at the time of writing, it is still doing the latter — meaning it is technically operating without a proper legal basis. But this summer Meta announced an intention to switch to consent.)
> [...]
> As we reported earlier this month, Meta is relying on a line in a ruling handed down by the bloc’s top court, the CJEU, earlier this year — where the judges allowed the possibility — caveated with “if necessary” — of an (another caveat) “appropriate fee” being charged for an equivalent alternative service (i.e. that lacks tracking and profiling). So the legal fight against Meta’s continued tracking and profiling of users will hinge on what’s necessary and appropriate in this context.
Typical shady Facebook behavior trying to force everyone to press "Accept all" since otherwise their business model is broken. Hopefully the EU will move quickly to close the legal loophole they are trying to exploit.