I'm hopeful as well, although pessimistic. The demographic of people who would pay money to escape advertising are also quite profitable if you can successfully target in your advertising campaigns.
Wow. The "US and Canada" ARPU is crazy high. I thought it would be around $10/year not 5 times higher.
Could the increase in ARPU over time be used as a "harm to consumer" argument in favour of antitrust action? The effective "price" of using these services is increasing.
i think they'd still spy, you just wouldn't get ads. The more they spy and learn about their users the more accurate the ads become for those that chose to see them.
I would pay for it if on top of removing ads, I do not see cringe “suggested for you content”. I mean there are only so many DIY hacks, people nodding to a video running in the background, dancing people who can’t dance, people lip syncing an unoriginal audio etc. I can watch.
>>The bloc's regulators ruled last year that Meta must give users the option to opt out of personalized ads based on their activity on their platforms.
The suggested subscription model could yet change, as it is not clear whether EU regulators will deem the new plan as compliant with EU laws.<<
extortion, is not 'giving an option'.
amazon has done this a number of times, it seems FB is following a play from MS, by copying the competition a day late and a dollar short.
Loool, this sounds interesting. If it'll get to this point, I'll delete all meta accounts for sure, but I guess I'm a minority, still, interesting if someone will switch to say Snapchat bc of these changes
Seem's pretty reasonable to make it up front. Instead of this BS 'free' people can explicitly opt for which style they'd like. Pay or tracked ads. No more issues of consent.
I expect the EU in general won't stand for it though as too many people will make the 'wrong' selection.
It's not reasonable because consent must be freely given. That includes there not being any negative consequences for saying no. A paywall is a negative consequence.
Does it not also apply to the service provider?
Does the service provider also get the right to consent to show their content or services under certain conditions?
In a voluntary society, both parties must consent to the arrangement for a user to (freely) use a service.
The core principle of how EU and GDPR treats privacy rights is that they're inalienable, they're not for sale, they can't be traded away in a contract or arrangement.
So for use cases where you need the user's consent because you don't have a different GDPR-valid reason for processing data (many reasonable use cases don't need consent, but user tracking for advertising generally does), that processing is permitted only if that consent is freely given i.e. willingly 'gifted'.
One way how it's implemented is that if some service if conditional upon 'consent' then there is literally no way to get 'GDPR-valid' consent - the user clicking 'I consent' to bypass a paywall doesn't count as the user consenting, and neither does signing a personalized pen&paper contract saying that the user consents to tracking in return for getting free use of some service, because that's not "freely given consent" and so it doesn't permit Meta to track that user. It's just like signing a contract where you get $10000 in return for agreeing to be enslaved for some time - your freedom is not something that can legally be sold, and so are the privacy rights.
The other way how it's implemented in GDPR is that it must be possible to withdraw consent at any time (including 5 seconds after signing up to a service) without any adverse consequences such as the service being cancelled or increasing in price. Obviously that's not a problem if the consent is freely given, but if someone tries to figure out some roundabout way of buying or trading for consent, the consequence-free cancellation makes the point that it's not supposed to work that way.
Of course, companies are not required to provide any service, and they can require a fee for some services - however what they can't do is buy 'consent' with discounts or free service; the GDPR limitations to tracking users are intended to apply to all tiers of users, no matter what Meta does or wants to do. Meta can gift users free service; users can 'gift' Meta consent to tracking, but they can't make a binding contract on that because under GDPR conditional consent is literally meaningless and worthless.
There are two main things. One is that the 'cookie law' is quite different in scope and terms (e.g. it also applies to various non-personalized cookies), and the consent conditions for accepting cookies in that law are substantially different than the ones in GDPR; and I it's quite likely (since I don't read French) that they're asserting that the particular usage of any privately indentifiable cookie data (if any) they are doing is permitted by one of the non-consent clauses of GDPR e.g. the legitimate need sections.
The other is that GDPR is still 'enforcement-limited', and there are many organizations that simply violate GDPR - the fact that some organization has done something for years and has not yet been forced to change their ways does not imply that what they do is permitted by GDPR; it's just that the enforcement of GDPR for the trickier parts like online services (as opposed to the important services in physical world, employment, real estate and renting, banking, telecommunications, medicine, etc which were prioritized and are now highly compliant) is starting with the larger violators like Meta, other companies would be handled afterwards, and since news companies are 'politically sensitive' I'd expect that lemonde.fr would be among the very, very last on the regulator's list.
You are right, I don't know why you are downvoted. META can't charge depending on your tracking consent, they'll have to do it for everybody in the EU.
IIUC, the EU's position is basically this: You can use Ads to fund your service but any tracking needs consent or You can instead charge for your product but again any tracking needs consent.
You can't go "Ads + Tracking" or "No Ads + No Tracking" there are 4 options not 2.
Facebook and Insta seem like they would lend themself well to showing ads related to the content of your timeline. For example a post about a wedding would pair perfectly with an ad about wedding gifts or nice dresses, no tracking required.
Facebook's issue might just be that their entire ad platform is instead built around personalized ads. Revamping their ad network to do well with content ads might not be worth it. Especially since that would cede ground and might compel other jurisdictions to force them out of personalized ads as well.
The pricing reminds me of when contractors quote 2-3x normal for jobs they don't want to do. I'm sure Facebook is expecting that 99.99% of people will just agree to tracking and in a few years they can shutter the paid tier as an "unsuccessful experiment".
I would say the opposite. The people who are able and willing to pay are worth the most to advertise to. So if Facebook wants to maintain revenue, it has to set the ad free price high because they are losing their most valuable product, richer people’s attention.
I think it's more like "in order to match my megaprofits, you need to give me this". I really believe they make a lot or money with custom ads - I don't have data though.
It's a bit more complicated, in that creating and maintaining all the payment processing infrastructure is a huge hassle to make without recouping sufficient cost per user. There's still not really a good option for microtransactions and it's a big problem.
But... There's no way on earth Facebook is making $14/mo off me in adds. It's just not even close. I'd be happy to pay if the value were anywhere close to a match, but it's just not. I mean, that's en par with streaming services and youtube. If Facebook thinks they're even in the same order of magnitude as far as content quantity and quality as that, they're delusional.
If I had to guess an actual fair value for the average user, it'd be around $3-5/mo max. For me personally, it can't be more than $1-2/mo. But maintaining all the payment infrastructure for that when any amount deters most users is pointless. Companies always price these non-free tiers really high.
What's the alternative? People choose the ad-supported options because they like the product experience. I having a hard time understanding what the legislative solution to this problem is
I'm not a cryptobro, but I was really hoping for a while that browser based miners could maybe solve the payment issue.
I was happy to trade some cpu cycles for an ad free experience. I would win, the site would win, it seemed like a really nice idea.
People immediately balked at the concept though and while I have no faith in crypto or its proponents at all, it's nice to think of what could have been.
Because most users are on mobile devices and battery life is a limited resource. It isn't good for the user OR the business if their device dies mid-day and they stop consuming because you ran a miner in the background.
That can't be the only reason though. There are lots of things that are significantly worse/totally absent on mobile OSes already. Lots of software is made desktop-first, including apps like obsidian and (from the current HN frontpage) Arc browser. Mobile users have been 2nd class citizens in some ways for a while.
We were discussing Meta though. They absolutely depend on mobile, that is the majority of their user-base. In fact that is the majority on all ad-supported social media sites, so mining is a non-starter for them. Mobile traffic is >55% of all traffic and >80% for social media sites.
I'm not sure that the original comment was in context of meta or ad experiences in general online, but yeah I'd agree that meta needs mobile users a lot.
You'd be trading cpu cycles, which consume power, which cost money. So you're trading money for an ad-free experience. You're paying actual money to remove adds.
And doing it with a cpu that's not particularly efficient compared to asics.
The irony here is that paying for stuff here helps you avoid the ads only. You still don't own your data, when you agree to their ToS, which they can use internally.
Agreed but sadly all too late. I have lost all faith in this company. With all the data privacy scandals like Cambridge Analytica i will never trust this company again with my data. I would not put it past them to somehow sell the profiles from paying customers.
In principle though it sounds great. If the customers pays Meta might do something that will make them happier than the advertisers. I will wait though until they actually confirm this.
One thing looks fishy though. Why only europe? If you implement this, would you not want to role it out globally? Would you not want as many paying customers as possible? This tells me potentially that they know many people will stop using the service and they will lose users so the subscription might only recover some of the loss but not the full amount.
I generally agree, and am quite comfortable to pay for services that are important to me like email. Though I am aware that I am in a relatively privileged position where the cost of online services isn't a big deal to me. Facebook and Google have allowed millions of people of more modest means to have reliable access to email, video, search, social media, etc, at the cost of their privacy. I'm not sure how to solve that problem.
The other thing for be is the reputation of the company. I happily pay mailbox.org for email, Bitwarden for a password manager, Mullvad for a VPN, etc. But the idea of becoming a paying customer of Meta just strikes me as icky given their reputation for being anti-privacy and anti-user. It's not really a problem for me now as I don't use Facebook but when they inevitably start charging for WhatsApp I'm not sure what I will do.
I'd be willing to bet money that the operative words here are "wants to". As in, they'd like to, and someone floated it as a possibility, but no one on the team is actually taking it seriously as a real strategy going forwards. $14/month is a crazy high fee.
This is just financial reporters taking a random brainstormed idea out of context and misrepresenting it as a serious strategy to generate headlines and buzz.
I might pay $14/mo for Facebook + Instagram + Threads + WhatsApp if there was no tracking or ads whatsoever. Emphasis on the "whatsoever". And it's not just because of how I use these apps now, but also for how I might better use them if they actually had a user-first mentality. Or at least not user-last.
The most fascinating part of this is that it puts a concrete figure on how much your attention is worth to Facebook with regards to what it makes from advertisers.
$14 a month is (to me) an astonishing figure when you see it written out. To think that just Facebook’s cut, of just the profit, of just what you’ve been manipulated to buy beyond what you otherwise would have would mean that earnestly the data suggests that the average person is likely spending well over $100 a month on things they didn’t even want in the first place because of targeted advertising.
I need X. A and B both have X product. It's worth for them something to make me aware of and buy their product over competition. So that $14 is not just "didn't even want".
With google advertisements mean that your competitors page doesn't appear above your search listing. It means that if you sell something you more or less have to buy ads for your own name, or else people searching explicitly for you will be led to your competitors products.
It's sort of like a race to the bottom.
With facebook I understand that if you want to actually get a message out to people who've explicitly subscribed to your content you need to pay them. Same sort of thing. Sure, it's an "ad", but not in the same sense as like a billboard or a TV spot. It's actually game-theoretic coercion.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 223 ms ] threadbowl of popcorn time, for sure.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
Could the increase in ARPU over time be used as a "harm to consumer" argument in favour of antitrust action? The effective "price" of using these services is increasing.
The suggested subscription model could yet change, as it is not clear whether EU regulators will deem the new plan as compliant with EU laws.<<
extortion, is not 'giving an option'.
amazon has done this a number of times, it seems FB is following a play from MS, by copying the competition a day late and a dollar short.
Do what we say or you can't do business in Europe?
Pay for services or don't get served?
I expect the EU in general won't stand for it though as too many people will make the 'wrong' selection.
In a voluntary society, both parties must consent to the arrangement for a user to (freely) use a service.
So for use cases where you need the user's consent because you don't have a different GDPR-valid reason for processing data (many reasonable use cases don't need consent, but user tracking for advertising generally does), that processing is permitted only if that consent is freely given i.e. willingly 'gifted'.
One way how it's implemented is that if some service if conditional upon 'consent' then there is literally no way to get 'GDPR-valid' consent - the user clicking 'I consent' to bypass a paywall doesn't count as the user consenting, and neither does signing a personalized pen&paper contract saying that the user consents to tracking in return for getting free use of some service, because that's not "freely given consent" and so it doesn't permit Meta to track that user. It's just like signing a contract where you get $10000 in return for agreeing to be enslaved for some time - your freedom is not something that can legally be sold, and so are the privacy rights.
The other way how it's implemented in GDPR is that it must be possible to withdraw consent at any time (including 5 seconds after signing up to a service) without any adverse consequences such as the service being cancelled or increasing in price. Obviously that's not a problem if the consent is freely given, but if someone tries to figure out some roundabout way of buying or trading for consent, the consequence-free cancellation makes the point that it's not supposed to work that way.
Of course, companies are not required to provide any service, and they can require a fee for some services - however what they can't do is buy 'consent' with discounts or free service; the GDPR limitations to tracking users are intended to apply to all tiers of users, no matter what Meta does or wants to do. Meta can gift users free service; users can 'gift' Meta consent to tracking, but they can't make a binding contract on that because under GDPR conditional consent is literally meaningless and worthless.
Is that actually illegal? Or am I missing a difference with what you're describing?
The other is that GDPR is still 'enforcement-limited', and there are many organizations that simply violate GDPR - the fact that some organization has done something for years and has not yet been forced to change their ways does not imply that what they do is permitted by GDPR; it's just that the enforcement of GDPR for the trickier parts like online services (as opposed to the important services in physical world, employment, real estate and renting, banking, telecommunications, medicine, etc which were prioritized and are now highly compliant) is starting with the larger violators like Meta, other companies would be handled afterwards, and since news companies are 'politically sensitive' I'd expect that lemonde.fr would be among the very, very last on the regulator's list.
You can't go "Ads + Tracking" or "No Ads + No Tracking" there are 4 options not 2.
Facebook's issue might just be that their entire ad platform is instead built around personalized ads. Revamping their ad network to do well with content ads might not be worth it. Especially since that would cede ground and might compel other jurisdictions to force them out of personalized ads as well.
This is all really positive, and proof that these regulations are working, imo.
It's a bit more complicated, in that creating and maintaining all the payment processing infrastructure is a huge hassle to make without recouping sufficient cost per user. There's still not really a good option for microtransactions and it's a big problem.
But... There's no way on earth Facebook is making $14/mo off me in adds. It's just not even close. I'd be happy to pay if the value were anywhere close to a match, but it's just not. I mean, that's en par with streaming services and youtube. If Facebook thinks they're even in the same order of magnitude as far as content quantity and quality as that, they're delusional.
If I had to guess an actual fair value for the average user, it'd be around $3-5/mo max. For me personally, it can't be more than $1-2/mo. But maintaining all the payment infrastructure for that when any amount deters most users is pointless. Companies always price these non-free tiers really high.
We all know how this goes, where the paying customers end up even more lucrative to advertisers too.
I was happy to trade some cpu cycles for an ad free experience. I would win, the site would win, it seemed like a really nice idea.
People immediately balked at the concept though and while I have no faith in crypto or its proponents at all, it's nice to think of what could have been.
And doing it with a cpu that's not particularly efficient compared to asics.
You're better off just paying money.
14$ is more than they make off me by showing me ads. Trading CPU cycles seems more fair because it's only when I'm actually using the service.
In principle though it sounds great. If the customers pays Meta might do something that will make them happier than the advertisers. I will wait though until they actually confirm this.
One thing looks fishy though. Why only europe? If you implement this, would you not want to role it out globally? Would you not want as many paying customers as possible? This tells me potentially that they know many people will stop using the service and they will lose users so the subscription might only recover some of the loss but not the full amount.
The other thing for be is the reputation of the company. I happily pay mailbox.org for email, Bitwarden for a password manager, Mullvad for a VPN, etc. But the idea of becoming a paying customer of Meta just strikes me as icky given their reputation for being anti-privacy and anti-user. It's not really a problem for me now as I don't use Facebook but when they inevitably start charging for WhatsApp I'm not sure what I will do.
Anyone have experience running ads on Facebook? How is the UX?
This is just financial reporters taking a random brainstormed idea out of context and misrepresenting it as a serious strategy to generate headlines and buzz.
$14 a month is (to me) an astonishing figure when you see it written out. To think that just Facebook’s cut, of just the profit, of just what you’ve been manipulated to buy beyond what you otherwise would have would mean that earnestly the data suggests that the average person is likely spending well over $100 a month on things they didn’t even want in the first place because of targeted advertising.
There must be companies that spend on advertising and do not get any good return on it.
It's sort of like a race to the bottom.
With facebook I understand that if you want to actually get a message out to people who've explicitly subscribed to your content you need to pay them. Same sort of thing. Sure, it's an "ad", but not in the same sense as like a billboard or a TV spot. It's actually game-theoretic coercion.
That said, I have disposable income and always pay for ad free experiences when offered.