That makes sense. I will do it as well if advertising wasn't a model. In some ways, YouTube already allows that with Red.
I wonder how many people are like you though outside the tech forums and especially in developing countries (where a lot of the users for US based tech companies come from).
Yes, and even fewer people would pay for that on a continuous basis like a utility. If there was a free alternative everyone would just use that one and suggest it to their friends.
Although I suppose there could be a certain exclusivity and elite aspect to such a network, similar to how Facebook differentiated itself with exclusivity by only being available at universities in the beginning. A network that markets itself as both for higher class people willing to pay monthly and free of ads/tracking.
I believe FB makes something like $6.50 per user. Obviously Google makes money from users too, and given overlap it seems likely that one user is worth quite a bit annually. Average that out over lifetime value, and we’re talking thousands of dollars.
Imagine if the likes of Equifax treated silos of data as a liability instead of an asset to be milked. Properly valued, a breach of hundreds of millions of people’s data would end a business, even as large as Equifax.
This is interesting actually. In theory it makes sense for them to offer a subscription that gets rid of ads, and if priced well it could make them more money on a user than ads. I'm sure a few people would be pay $5.99 - $9.99 for ad-free Facebook, especially if this means getting rid of video ads too.
Yet, if too many people opt for the paid option, technically advertiser value would fall, since less users would be targetable. Moreover, $6.50 average per user means they probably make close to no money on some users, but a lot of money on others. If only their high-yielding users opt-in to an ad-less Facebook, this could mean big losses for them.
I guess this is why they haven't offered a paid version as an option ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> I'm sure a few people would be pay $5.99 - $9.99 for ad-free Facebook
It's not about the ads, it's about the tracking, profiling, and sharing/selling our data.
If I could pay a few dollars a month (I guess Facebook would be worth $3-5/mo to me, and Google $5-10/mo) and get out of the whole tracking/voter-manipulation/profiling/sharing data/etc. thing, that'd be worth it. That would have to include that any non-essential data is not recorded or (if I previously was on the free tier and am now paying for a year or so) permanently deleted. Of course many personal things fall in the 'necessary for functionality' category, like chat history and which pages I liked, but part of the deal is not using that data for anything other than the service itself. And if I decide to go to a competitor, I don't want to be blackmailed into paying to keep it private, so I'd want to have an option to permanently take out and delete my data once I leave.
Sounds like a tough bargain, given all the restrictions I'm putting on it, but the alternative is the current state where I'm not making them any money at all. Not using it is worth it to me, despite missing out on a few things. And I don't think the requirements are unfair, I'm just asking them to provide service X for price Y without anything else, but apparently in 2018 we have to mention that we don't want anything else, like having our data misused or shadow profiles being recorded.
