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Comment by maerF0x0 | Hacker News Reader

> Everybody hates ads, but no-one is willing to pay a penny for a service they use daily.

I wish they would price the service commensurate to what they earn with ads.

My ad watching gives them a few cents, and yet they want $8.99 for a month or some gems.

The dark part is you, as a consumer who is willing to pay to not watch ads, are worth considerably more than a few cents to advertise to. In fact, the more you are willing to pay to have no ads, the more valuable showing ads to you is…

That's an interesting point, reminds me of the dark pattern of donation options at checkout used to check for disposable income which the store could have captured.

“My ad watching gives them a few cents”

I don’t think this is remotely true for most major ad-tech services.

For U.S. users, Google and Meta average several hundred dollars of annual ad revenue each. To replace their ad revenue you would need to charge ~$30+ a month for the service.

Interesting, yes. I put my approximate youtube numbers into chatGPT and it estimates $2.40-$9 a month, so at most I'm earning them on par with their cheapest offering.

I recommend using a calculator rather than a chatbot. (Speaking of quality.)

It wrote a program and used publicly available numbers as the inputs. We're not in the "how many r's in strawberry" era anymore.

And you verified that program and its input sources, right?

Do you verify every input and output of your car's fuel system map? No, if the car runs well enough most of the time for your purposes you stop looking.

That is where chatGPT is for me these days on the kinds of tasks I throw at it, and for the seriousness of HN comment threads.

You're experiencing market segmentation. You won't pay $8.99 a month, so you don't get an ad-free product like the people who will pay. The service would rather get less than $8.99 from you than nothing, so you get ads.

But the part they seem to miss (or I get lost in the statistics) is that I wont use the service if I get annoyed by the ads. So they turn me into a churn which I wouldnt have been.

Right, you’re just getting lost in the statistics. Overall revenue is a function of revenue per user and number of users. They could go after you by reducing the ads, but they would also be reducing the revenue per user, and they might not gain enough additional people for it to be worth it.

That's the delusional part. They think, that their service is so great, that obviously you don't have any choice but to use it anyway.

Individual memberships are priced 1000x higher than individual ad revenue because only 1 in 1000 users will pay for membership.

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