Meta’s monthly average revenue per user in Europe was $5.96 as of 2023-Q2. $14/month is quite the premium to opt out of its privacy invasion. Does Meta really think it is worth more to people than Spotify or Disney+?
$6 is the average but the set of people willing to pay for add free are both the heaviest users and the ones with the most disposable income. Let’s say you offer this for $6, only the top 10% would pay for it. But the top 10% might generate $10. If you charge $10, only the top 5% would pay and they generate $12, and so on.
I wonder if creating a paid tier of users that won't see ads significantly devalues Meta's advertising proposition.
From the perspective of an advertiser, I don't really see the appeal in running an ad on a platform where all the users who have signaled they have disposable income and are willing to pay for online services don't see any ads.
Potentially these paying users weren’t the market anyway. Someone willing to pay to not see your ads maybe hostile to any brand forcing them in front of their eyeballs.
That's possible. I thought most people with that mindset would be running adblockers, so probably wouldn't be interested in paying for an ad-free experience.
I'm sure there are people who aren't aware of adblockers or aren't savvy enough to use them, but how many?
No problem, just sell their user data for a premium so they can be advertised too in other ways. Its worth squeezing this one in many extra ways since, as you said, they've signaled they are valuable targets.
Plus Meta can also change it to limited ads later and sell those for bigger money.
Depending on the ad system and your user tracking /fingerprinting setup, you can get that information and then track the user to other places on the internet and then show ads to them there.
I'd wager that 14$/month is actually really cheap given who will pay for it.
The average per user may be $5.96, but I imagine that the people who will pay 14 $/month have more disposable income and are therefore in the demographics that advertisers would pay a premium for.
There is a high correlation between people who opt out of ads by paying and folks advertisers want to target. This creates a dilemma which increases ad load on those who don't pay to make up the difference.
You assume that paid users are actually option out of privacy invasion. They aren’t seeing ads but that doesn’t mean Meta isn’t invading privacy to continue to build a profile if you and those who you connect with regardless of payment.
I remember the first time I met her at a Web dev conference. She chatted with me for a half hour, telling stories of browser rivalries and HTML5’s renegade group that saved us all from XHTML. We ran into each other several times over the years. She always was kind, encouraging, and genuinely interested in what I had to say. She gave us all so much. Her suffering over the last decade was a cruel fate.
Ah, that's part of the root of this issue - we don't know based on the facts in evidence if this is a widespread concern or not. We only know that it's a concern to those three people.
As you can see, there are more than three people in this thread alone who feel strongly in the opposite.
It seems to me the right things to do would be for the ASF to reach out to some Apache organizations to ask their thoughts, and for the article authors to approach (or create, if necessary) similar representative groups to make a formal statement of position.
Of all the people in this discussion, you seem to be the most thirsty to win a political fight, with all of your demeaning and ranting "ridiculous, useless and unnecessary" posts, to quote your own insulting words.
Are you done ridiculing and dismissing people yet, or are you still thirsty for more fighting and nothing else?
This is what excites me about the proposed W3 Web Monetization standard. I don't want to establish a billing relationship with every creator whose content I value.
Have a wallet that's loaded with value, send out payments for every second you spend with a creator's work.
Totally agree with this. We'll just end up with more waffling long form content packed with videos and distractions to encourage users to spend more time trying to find what they were originally looking for.
Thank you! I'm in the same boat and think that it's a great potential way forward, with very little friction - it can work on any random blog without me having to trust them with my payment details. I hope more people pick up on it ( and tried to help with an article that somehow got to #1 on HN, but the comments were mostly negative)
I really wish Deezer's user-centric payment system would get traction. It would apportion royalties based on a subscriber's listening instead of all plays across all subscribers. https://www.deezer.com/ucps
Annddd Medium paywall, so I guess I'll never know.
Anyway, I hope the WebMonetization.org standard catches on to help more writers earn money from less committed readers. I am seeing the Coil icon in Firefox light up on more sites every week.
