But will it actually be ad-free, or just personalized ad-free?
Because if it’s actually ad-free, you might find a decent number of people willing to pay it. (Especially those without the technical know-how to block ads, a small fee is probably worth it to them.)
If it’s just personalized ad-free, and still has generic ads, you’ll have basically nobody who gives enough of a shit to pay.
Under the plans, which have been discussed with regulators in Brussels and Ireland, Meta would offer an ad-free version of Instagram and Facebook for those willing to pay, or a free version for those who consent to be targeted by ads based on their personal information, these people said.
I think this is showing both how much your data is worth, and what it costs to actually run / use these services. People don’t want to pay, but I’ve always thought pay for a service was a potentially much less shitty business model. However, instead what we often get now is both pay for a service and still privacy invasion / selling our data. And who’s going to trust Facebook here?
Except not at all. This isn’t what it costs them or what your data (targeted ad views) are worth. This is what the hope a few suckers will pay them (and to get you used to the idea of extremely expensive premium services), and otherwise at least 3 (but probably more) orders of magnitude more than they’d make if you watched the ads.
All these subscriptions have the same problem: they’re incredibly pricey, offer almost nothing in return (they usually still track you), and if you had to pay them all you’d have like at least a $2k hole in your budget just for subscriptions.
It just doesn’t make sense.
I’m not sure that you’re not underestimating the cost for these sorts of services. The only long running sort of social media (BBS) I know of that is and has been for decades straight pay for access is The WELL. And they need to charge $15 a month.
https://www.well.com/join/pricing/
Of course, they’re not anywhere near the scale of Facebook, but they are similar to a mid sized fediverse server from what I can tell. I honestly think the actual thing going on is most people find value in a free service, but don’t find enough value to pay what it’d cost to make it a straightforward pay for service business.
Even if it was free and ad-free I wouldn’t want it.
LOL
Giving even more money to those clowns? LMAO
I understand for ad free YouTube with premium since video ads are god awful. But for FB and insta it doesn’t make sense. Who spends that much time on those platforms and even when you get ads you can just immediately skip them.
I don’t know about facebook but uBlock Origin blocks ads on instagram web just fine.
Doesn’t stop the tracking of you on the platform itself. They still scrape your personal photos, your messages, your location, the things you’ve watched, the things you engage with to determine who you are and what you’d like.
Yeah, well not much I can do about that, except not use their services at all. Generally what ever I post online is meant for public consumption so have at it. It’s quite limited how much data they can gather when I’m not using their proprietary software and as long as I don’t need to watch those ads it’s fine. They’re going to scrape everything I post into Lemmy/Pixelfed aswell.