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I've never heard it stated quite so plainly, but that makes a lot of sense. I wonder if the billion dollars in funding demands more.

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This seems to me to be the problem. They took too much money to monetize in this way. A few bucks a month from a few million users, plus whatever they can make by occasionally inserting ads into the stream (which can't be that much considering how many people would never even see an ad because their streams are too noisy) just doesn't seem like enough to justify all the VC money...

It's improbable they would have the amount of users they have now if users had to pay a subscription. Do you think Facebook would?

Agreed, that's why I said "a few bucks a month from a few million users". I can't imagine that more than a couple million of their hundreds of millions of users would pay to remove the ads from their feeds.

Sorry, I mis-read that.

Perhaps they can charge for certain items that can be considered premium, such as verified accounts. I still doubt there'll be a couple million of users willing to pay though.

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