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Comment by iLoveOncall | Hacker News Reader

It's insane that those subscriptions don't remove ads. That's the only thing I would even remotely consider paying for on any meta product.

In the current state those subscriptions will just show your friends that you're a huge loser who's willing to pay for custom backgrounds.

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People who pay subscriptions are exactly the sort of people you want to advertise to the most since they've signaled they have money. It's like flashing a big wad of cash in a seedy bar.

Why would they remove the ads from users who have proven that they would even pay for a Facebook subscription?

The hurdle is instagram makes ~$27/mo per user from ad revenue.

Would you pay $27/mo for instagram?

You probably couldn't even sell an Instagram/Facebook/WhatsApp bundle for ~$25 per month.

This sort of looks like a subscription for influencers, organisation and "power users". Even if you turned off the ads, most of people feed, from what I've seen are basically ads they signed up for, e.g. posts from companies, so I doubt that most even care.

Unfortunately, Meta’s ad business is so effective that they would need to charge hundreds of dollars per year for an ad free service just to keep revenue stable. I suspect anything less than $25 per month would be loss making for them.

The last numbers I saw are almost 10 years old now, and then it was $65 per year in profit for a Facebook user, in the US, a little less for someone in the EU and almost nothing in most other places.

Are there new numbers that one can access? I can imagine the value has gone up, but hundreds of dollars seem like a lot.

They do offer a €8/month ad-free Instagram subscription in the EU. I'm subscribed, it's pretty cool.

If you used Android you can get this for free or just use it on the web with an adblocker.

And even then, they wouldn't remove ads since they'd want to add to their profits!

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