Visit Twitter and you'll certainly see people who paid there.

Paying for Twitter doesn't remove ads. People are subscribing for the blue check mark.

Really?? That's crazy

Some people do have a legit need for some level of verification. However, I also find a surprising number of people who seem to be quite deeply invested in the status, for lack of a better word. This really started pre-Musk when a blue checkmark theoretically meant you were notable (on some axis).

> Some people do have a legit need for some level of verification.

AFAIK there is no verification involved in the blue check purchase. It just indicates that the account holder pays some money every month.

Its even worse. Revenue payout for creators is based on impressions of ads towards the paying users.

Meaning there is incentive to show even more ads to the ones who pay.

Elon is genuising twitter very hard :D

That's false. First, it reduces the number of ads, second, it gives you many pro features like long tweets, edit button, and increased visibility in certain situations.

I can't tell if you're joking...

I'm not joking. It's true

That's unfortunate :( Twitter's become a parody of itself, lol

Guess people have a natural aversion to paying for someone else to not do something. It kind of makes sense.

I mean arguably you're not even paying them to not do something, you're paying them to make it easier for you to not do something, and to not complain when you refrain from doing so.

The web is weird when you try to insist on the original meaning of 'user-agent'.

The (sometimes) unwritten part of all of those demands is a reasonably priced ad-free version. Down the thread somebody stated an annual revenue of $18 per EU user, so they want to make an order of magnitude more revenue on you in order to not show you ads. Is that reasonable? I don't think so

The people willing to pay for this have more expendable income, and are more likely to take out their CCs and pay for something online. Ad-driven services like fb/insta will make more money from this demographic, and so their revenue "per user willing to pay for no ads" will be significantly higher.

Yes. Ironically, paying not to see ads only drives up the value of our attention even higher and makes them want to advertise to us even more. Paying to avoid ads is really just paying for the privilege of doing free market segmentation on their behalf.

Per quarter, not per year. That is also the average across all users, while only the power users (ones that make up a majority of the ad revenue) will pay for a subscription, so their ad value is a lot more than average.

If the average revenue per user is then 72$ per year, then, it follows that the appropriate price is 6$ a month, not 12$?

Read the second part of what I wrote. If every existing user was forced to subscribe then $6 would be appropriate. If only people who earn them $50/mo in ads end up subscribing (which is a lot more likely) then Facebook will lose money on this option.

I was not clamoring for an ad-free version and would use these services if I would be paid, although it would need to be a nontrivial amount.

Exactly, in the world of arguments the price is irrelevant for comparison!

Isn't this intentionally priced so that people won't pay for it? Does Facebook really make €12.99 per month per user?

It seems designed to be priced as high as possible, so that users don't choose it and they can claim no one wants it, and that they have consent.

If it was €2.99/mo, which seems much more reasonable, how many people would choose it?

Facebook ARPU for Europe is $19.04 per quarter, or $6.33 per month. This is based on monthly active users and includes Messenger. If you adjust for that - someone paying for a subscription is likely to be much more active than an average monthly user - it's likely that 10 EUR is a loss. The big winners are Apple and Google getting their cut if it's an IAP.

The economics are even worse in US/Canada, where an MAU is worth $56.11 per quarter, or $18.70 per month.

(EURUSD is 1.06, near parity.)

I think there's also a major tax difference between subs and ads, working in the same direction.

They don't need to collect VAT on the revenue from the vast majority of ads (basically only ads bought by individuals, which can't be common). They would need to do it for the subscriptions, and the end-user pricing is with VAT included. That's going to be another 20-25% off.

It seems very plausible that they are making less profit from the subscribers than from the non-subscribers at these prices. The pricing might still be more than people are willing to pay, but it's not any kind of scam.

Who are these people that make advertising so valuable? Everyone I know either doesn't click on FB ads, or if they did, they've got a story about how they got scammed by some fly-by-night drop shipper.

Evidently, your friends are clicking on those ads, as they are getting scammed. It's unlikely they just clicked on scams.

It's true that a lot of people essentially never click the ads, but it's also true that seemingly smart and educated people can be extremely dumb about these things.

how do you think they make money? its more likely that you live in a bubble than people dont click ads if you look at their earnings

Ever heard the story of cambridge analytica and the 2016 election? Granted, its an extreme of the system, but there are quiet some actors willing to pay for such services.

That seems plausible but can you cite where these figures are from? Is this just a rough estimate from total numbers for the entire company of $REVENUE / $MAUS?

Facebook publish ARPUs by geography (and a lot of other interesting numbers) every quarter as part of their earnings release. See slide 15 here:

https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_earnings/2023/q3/p...

And no, Facebook is not lying about those numbers.

Thanks!

I wouldn't expect them to be lying but there to be some data hiding in the "average" part of the ARPU. We often want the median or some other percentile, not the mean.

"We define ARPU as our total revenue in a given geography during a given quarter, divided by the average of the number of MAUs in the geography at the beginning and end of the quarter."

So that is about what I expected. I'm not going to dig into this but it could be very meaningful or extremely misleading. Interesting though.

Facebook don’t have to make 12.99EUR/user.

There are two values here: what percentage of people opt for the “ad-free” experience and how much FB makes per user. In fact, as long as their ad revenue per user is LESS than 12.99, this will work out net positive for them.

The only way it would be less is if the alternative is “not having Facebook”, rather than “Facebook with ads”.

> Isn't this intentionally priced so that people won't pay for it?

yes

then they'll go back to the regulator and say "we tried, no-one was interested"

I would argue that people who potentially would like to pay for this are worth far less in terms of revenue for Meta than the rest. For instance, I use Facebook semi-regularly, mostly because I follow some people and also have a few Messenger chats open to the side, I ignore their advertising completely. Would I like Facebook ad-free? Yes. Would I pay for it? No. Would I, as a user, care if Meta declared bankruptcy tomorrow and ceased immediately? Certainly not.

I'm one of these people.

The problem I have is trust. Ads or nit, I no longer trust Facebook to not continue violating my privacy WHILE I'm a paying customer.

The trust has been broken and without data transparency and regulations with teeth, I simply won't give them another chance.

> Ads or not, I no longer trust Facebook to not continue violating my privacy WHILE I'm a paying customer

You're right to be skeptical of companies that "believe in an ad supported Internet".

Not so long ago we learned Google's toggle to turn off your web activity history turned off your ability to see your history, not Google's collection of it:

That document goes on to state: "Contrary to Mr Pichai's Congressional testimony, the founder of Google's Privacy and Data Protection Office testified in this case that he is 'not aware of any setting' that users can employ to prevent Google from collecting data related to their app activity."

Much of the issue, allegedly, is that WAA, rather than saving data when on and not saving it when off, simply saves data in a different place – not in the Google Account data set. Addressing the confusion about the bounds of Google Accounts, Hochman said, "So I'm aware that Google may save data in different locations, depending on where that WAA/sWAA switch is set. It is still collecting the same data and still saving it, but it may save it in different places."

https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/24/google_privacy_button...

Of course not. It's a complete scam. Imagine paying money for the privilege of doing market segmentation for them. Not to mention the fact they're still vacuuming up vast amounts of your personal information for their surveillance capitalism machine.

Showing ads to users is a minor aspect of FB's business model. The data collection and shady markets around it are far more lucrative. By charging a subscription they get users to pay them twice: with the actual subscription, and with their personal data like everyone else, which they'll still profit from.

Plus now they get some good PR in Europe, and potentially more users that buy into this marketing tactic. Absolutely evil company.

> Showing ads to users is a minor aspect of FB's business model. The data collection and shady markets around it are far more lucrative.

Do you have a source for this claim? It's possibly true, but I suspect in reality it's actually the opposite.

No, it's mere speculation on my part. I doubt such proof would exist anyway, as the entire data broker market is intentionally obscured from the public. But it would be foolish not to think that the adtech giants are not major players of its $300bn worth.

A couple lines of thinking lead me to believe this:

- Why would they collect data from people who are not their users, i.e. shadow profiles? Is it really so that when people sign-up they have a better UX, or is it so they can still sell this lower quality data to whoever might find it useful?

- Showing ads to users is only profitable if the user is part of an ad campaign. Meanwhile, user data can be sold perpetually many times, even if they're not directly advertised to on FB. Why _wouldn't_ FB want to be part of this highly unregulated and lucrative market?

Believing anything these companies say publicly is too naive, given their track record of deception. So I don't mind all this being dismissed as FUD. :)

Ads are like 99% of their revenue. The rest of this is FUD

This is total nonsense. Facebook’s most valuable asset is their data which is why they don’t sell it, they rent access to it. It is much better for Facebook if you have to come to them every time you want to target an ad to a 24-28 year old male in the Bay Area with an interest in menswear than if they just sell a CSV with a list of said males.

This is the easiest thing in the world to check: their quarterly earnings are public. If you don’t believe those earnings, I would suggest filing a complaint with the SEC because you would have uncovered one of the larger securities fraud cases of all time.

I am certainly not going to pay for Facebook. I hate everything about it and barely spend any time there.

If I could pay for it to be sane, to actually show what my friends were up to in chronological order, to show what is around me of interest etc we might be talking.

I mean, I pay for YouTube Premium, as I use YouTube regularly.

I won't pay for this, as I use Facebook approximately once a year. I wonder what that will do to Facebook's user numbers if they choose to get rid of users like me though. I suspect the actively active userbase to be much smaller than their usual billion+ user count.

(Pre-Musk even) Twitter gave me an ultimatum about consenting to tracking across the internet or deleting my account. This is why I no longer have a twitter account.

I pay for YT Premium because I think the price is well worth it.

There's no universe where I trust Zucc and Meta. They're just gonna take my money, still collect every molecule of information they can about me and anyone even slightly related to me (while building shadow profiles of the ones without an account), and probably STILL show ads, just more cleverly hidden. (not that I use FB mind you, just in a theoretical world where I did and indeed got offered to pay for FB with no ads)