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Comment by tgma | Hacker News Reader

People who spew I'd rather pay, I'd rather pay often majorly underestimate how expensive Google and Facebook would have to be in the western world to offset the ad revenue per person. The irony is this is especially true for you if money is no object to you, as you'd be disproportionately valuable to the ad machine. It's not going to be ten bucks folks.

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You can actually look this information up! For example, Instagram makes approx $2-50 ad revenue per user per year, depending on the region. Apparently it’s highest in North America.

So <$5 per month for someone in the developed world to keep using Instagram and stop being the product. If they redesigned the app around what’s best for users vs advertisers, it actually seems like a great deal, considering many people spend multiple hours per day on apps like these.

Of course this would get pretty expensive for all the services we use. But I personally would happily throw $100-$250 per year at my most used apps to stop being advertised to.

How's your YouTube Premium subscription?

I don’t watch enough YouTube to warrant that. My elderly father on the other hand, who watches several hours of YouTube per day on his television, finally got YouTube premium and has found it to be life changing. The TV YouTube app regularly shows 2+ minutes of unskipable adds per video.

That was a great deal when it came bundled with YouTube music. When they bizarrely tried to merge the two products so that when I was interested in watching videos, all I got was music video recommendations, it lost its lustre.

Now I would rather just pay for a couple Patreons. I heard there's some new pay to use YouTube thing out there that creators are pushing, I can't remember the name but I hopped on it and didn't see any extra content beyond what's offered on YouTube so I don't see the point.

Oh and before I got grayjay so I could have ad free casting of videos, premium was nice for when watching on the tv.

I pay for multiple patreons, too. I wish patreon wouldn’t be such a shitty website/app. It’s insane what basic features it’s missing.

Considering cancelling mine because they've introduced ads to it in the form of undismissable "purchase the product being discussed here" affiliate popups.

The popups are absolutely massive, too. It’s infuriating.

It's without a doubt one of the best value for money subscription available, except for electricity, water, a library subscription.

There's an endless amount of the highest quality videos available on YouTube. But you need to let the algorithm understand what you like by using the conveniently named "Like" and "Dislike" buttons.

Fantastic, the family plan is probably one of the best subscriptions I've ever purchased. If one reads the comments in this thread you'd be left to assume YouTube Premium would have had to be $100/month/person though and not something Google could ever have considered offering.

If you are in the US and in a demographic who posts on Hacker News, $100-$250 is likely below your monthly revenue contribution to Google alone.

I've never paid Google for anything. I usually get a check from them. What does Google sell? Office clone, ads, map api credits, search api credits, ad free youtube, ai credits sometimes phones and speakers that get bricked?

They sell your digitalSelf habits.

everyone of those things is built around data collection and tracking, which feeds their ad machine.

I’m pretty confident that at least 95% of HN users use adblocking so clearly the users are not worth much to the ad companies. Today I have absolutely zero ads on my devices.

most-all of the algorithm-served content (not from my friends list) is ad content, even if it's not a meta-served ad.

all content (even those who make legitimate content, if they intend on making a living on content) is just ads packaged in fancy UGC. we've reached a point of no return for ads and user targeting

You've missed the point of the comment that you've replied to. There's a well known adverse selection effect because the people who would pay for no ads are exactly the people who you most want to be able to serve ads to: people with lots of disposable income, and people who are power users who see the most ads.

As a result the actual amount that they would need to charge for an ad-free version is higher than the average revenue per user, possibly significantly so.

edit: you can look at YouTube premium for an example of this in practice. It's $16/mo for no ads. That's around 2-3x or more what their revenue per user is.

I also think the figure GP quoted are not US, but lumped together with depressed "developed" economies. US numbers should be a multiple of that.

Fair point. I think it depends on the person. I know plenty of people without much disposable income who still pay for several subscriptions.

That's also how you get to little disposable income. It's choices people make and that's their right but it does look odd occasionally.

The amount of money you spend doesn’t affect your disposable income, just your savings (beyond calculating interest). Unless we have different definitions of income or disposable.

Advertisers don’t care about disposable income they care about spending habits even if the buyer is irresponsible and can’t afford it

Exactly, so hacker news readers are not necessarily the people who would need to be charged the most to remove advertisements. I barely shop.

I think we are missing another angle of getting the data. Information is also power. Power to influence people (e.g. Cambridge Analytica). So paying will not stop the data collection. Actually I doubt anything will, unless people really push the regulators to do their job.

So they successfully blackmailed you.

>... and stop being the product.

You will not stop being the product if you pay.

This is true. But they would at least design the app around maximizing user satisfaction with the service (to keep you paying), vs maximizing time spent on the app (i.e. through making it addictive) in order to increase ad revenue. The current incentives are perverse.

That's a nice idea, but then there are all of the times we've started paying for services to have an ad-free experience, only to then have them toss ads back into the mix.

So it seems to go in capitalism sadly. If we could maintain healthy competition and avoid collusion, maybe we would be allowed to vote with our wallets. But right now that seems like a distant fantasy.

>> So <$5 per month for someone in the developed world to keep using Instagram and stop being the product.

This is only true if everyone does it; Why would they stop advertising for a tiny market, especially if they can get both? Why decrease the value of the tracking on a smaller userbase? Sales conversion says you'd have to charge $50 or $500 a month and you'd have a much smaller base; does social media like this even work with a fraction of the people?

Why would you include the money required to pay shareholders, pay the humongous parts of the company doing ad tech, the lobbying money, the fine money, etc. What is the cost of running a social media site?

I have previously calculated that Mastodon costs including development are on the order of 1 EUR/person/year [1]. Even if you 10x it, it's nothing. Facebook does nothing more technically complicated than the forums of the 90s. It's just smarter design.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38117385

I am not. I am explicitly saying to offset revenue from ads. That's a different question. Best of luck getting Facebook-level distribution in your 1 EUR Mastodon.

There are no technical reasons preventing the Mastodon federated network from scaling to billions of users. An individual server might not be able to scale to even 10 million users, but that is by design. There should be thousands or better tens of thousands of servers each supporting a small number of users, with moderation handled at the server level.

No technical reasons.

Ultimately the consumer is paying for the ad spend as well, so it can't be an outsized part of the budget.

You're assuming that your own data has no cost. They get data from you for free.

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