Comment by qqtt
19 hours ago
I'm going to go against the grain here and say this is probably a positive thing for Meta products, and honestly every other "free" service to provide these kinds of revenue avenues.
How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product" - well, the consequence of that is development resources tend to be pulled into directions that benefit advertisers.
By having material subscription revenue coming in for things outside the advertising space, the product managers can justify investing in features that otherwise would be passed up due to lack of revenue potential from advertising.
Yes, in many ways Meta gets to have their cake and eat it too, because the ads are still there even with the plans, but this does give a meaningful voice to their customers who pay that they can invest in other ways outside of strictly advertising.
You paying just signals that you're someone to push more ads to and to harvest more data on, since it means you have disposable income to spend on something as useless as instagram or facebook.
Meta isn't going to stop harvesting all your information just because you pay for a subscription, they'll harvest and sell your data AND take your money.
"Meta isn't going to stop harvesting all your information just because you pay for a subscription, they'll harvest [and sell] your data AND take your money." (Meta sells access not data)
Google has been doing this for a while with YouTube
The data collection and surveillance will of course be used to support online advertising services. The ads can be delivered outside YouTube by other Alphabet business units or partners
There seems to be a myth that paying so-called "tech" companies solves the problem of data collection, surveillance and online advertising. As if for every subscriber the company will voluntarily collect less data, perform less surveillance and sell less ad services, leaving that money on the table
The truth is that these subscribers, by paying the companies that perform data collection, surveillance and advertising services, are actually subsidising the practice
I pay YouTube Premium and get no ads there. It's totally worth it for me.
I get that they aren't performing less tracking on me, and they've labeled me as "will pay subscriptions for stuff".
But I get so much out of YouTube that's it's a no-brainer.
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Intermediary (middleman) creates nuisance then charges subscription fees to temporarily "remove" it for those few who pay
But no amount of payment will remove the nuisance. The intermediary has made it their "business model"
Remove the middleman to remove the nuisance
And YouTube recently (and silently) started approving multiple in-add ads for videos longer than 20 minutes. They destroyed the long-form content creators with their shorts push, and now it looks like they're trying to recover a little.
I don't subscribe to "YouTube Premuim" and I get no ads there
I avoid using Google's Javascript to play other peoples' uploaded videos
I get so much relief out of avoiding the Javascript, telemetry, data collection, behavioural surveillance, "recommendations" and ads, and whatever nonsense Google is doing behind the scenes
It's totally worth it for me
What are they even doing with all of this data collection, especially considering that ads still are terrible at pertaining to my interests?
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If I'm paying and still getting unwanted ads...then I am no longer going to be paying.
I'm not sure what win Meta sees here.
You may not get ads in the app, but they can still sell your data for other services who will give you ads.
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Isn't that the whole point of social media like Instagram? To convince the world you have disposable income and are living a lavish lifestyle?
Personally I like signaling that I have money. Why would you want people to think you're poor or cheap, except maybe when you're shopping for a car.
Why would you want to signal that? It relates in no way as to what kind of person you are. In fact, the richer you are, the more questions I have about how you got it and who got shafted along the way.
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> Why would you want people to think you're poor or cheap, except maybe when you're shopping for a car.
Personally, I don’t generally think about how other people perceive if I have money or not.
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If it's a tech company it's not "if it's free you're the product" it's just "you're the product" nowadays. I am so happy kids these days no longer trust tech because I'd hate to see how exploited they'd be otherwise.
People who spew I'd rather pay, I'd rather pay often majorly underestimate how expensive Google and Facebook would have to be in the western world to offset the ad revenue per person. The irony is this is especially true for you if money is no object to you, as you'd be disproportionately valuable to the ad machine. It's not going to be ten bucks folks.
You can actually look this information up! For example, Instagram makes approx $2-50 ad revenue per user per year, depending on the region. Apparently it’s highest in North America.
So <$5 per month for someone in the developed world to keep using Instagram and stop being the product. If they redesigned the app around what’s best for users vs advertisers, it actually seems like a great deal, considering many people spend multiple hours per day on apps like these.
Of course this would get pretty expensive for all the services we use. But I personally would happily throw $100-$250 per year at my most used apps to stop being advertised to.
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Why would you include the money required to pay shareholders, pay the humongous parts of the company doing ad tech, the lobbying money, the fine money, etc. What is the cost of running a social media site?
I have previously calculated that Mastodon costs including development are on the order of 1 EUR/person/year [1]. Even if you 10x it, it's nothing. Facebook does nothing more technically complicated than the forums of the 90s. It's just smarter design.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38117385
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Ultimately the consumer is paying for the ad spend as well, so it can't be an outsized part of the budget.
You're assuming that your own data has no cost. They get data from you for free.
> You paying just signals that you're someone to push more ads to and to harvest more data on
No, qqtt is correct that if you're paying, you get a vote. It may not be all that much of a vote, but it's more than you'd have if you weren't paying, and Meta will pay attention to it.
For a recent example of how this works, consider that with the post-October-7th wave of pro-Palestinian activism on US college campuses, a lot of rich Jews moved to squelch it as best they could -- not by offering new donations conditional on universities adopting their favored political positions, but by threatening to suspend their existing, habitual, "unconditional" donations.
The 'vote' is real. But it is 'darwinian'. It's not that animals develop a certain adaptation on purpose in order to survive. Instead, out of many random changes an adaptation emerges by selection: those that are the most advantageous get the chance to pass on their genes.
If everybody stops using meta apps and starts using signal, bluesky, mastodon, etc., meta would instantly transform their business (if they still can make a profit).
The problem is, subtly harvesting data from and even shoveling ads into paid subscriptions actually doesn't make consumers immediately and massively cancel their subs. So you can make a profit from subscriptions alone, or make an even larger profit by also collecting and monetizing your customers data. Guess who will win?
Not sure I understand this. The vote is, pay or not pay. If you pay, you vote yes.
> By having material subscription revenue coming in for things outside the advertising space, the product managers can justify investing in features that otherwise would be passed up due to lack of revenue potential from advertising.
You’re a Meta decision maker presented with 3 options. Which one do you pick? (remember, you’re not you…you’re a Meta decision maker trying to justify a trillion dollar valuation).
- Possible additional ad revenues
- Possible additional subscription revenues
- Possible additional ad and subscription revenues
to put a finer point on this: I pay for certain newspapers (well, digital subscriptions).
Still plenty of ads in the articles!
Your lack of complaining is expected and depended on, but I do encourage your continued enthusiasm in that acceptance! Someone's bottom line depends on it, and they probably make way more money than you so they really need it!
Plus now they even have your credit information for better ad targeting
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I'm fine with the static ads in the digitised print edition and the paper edition I get on Sataruday (even though I find some objectionable), but I block any and all digital ads with uBlock Origin, whether I'm a subscriber or not. I pay for a good national newspaper; they either make do with that or lose me as a long-time subscriber.
Newspapers are struggling/dying. A counterexample is services like HBO/Netflix which have ad-free tiers.
Insufficient information. Each option will address a different part of the market with a different size. Unless the potential revenue is estimated for each option, an informed decision is not possible.
Heard it here on HN: problem is paying a subscription is purely additive. eventually, inevitably, they’ll take the subscription AND sell your data, serve you ads, etc.
it being against what your payment contract states just means they’ll reinvent and rename the tiers.
> they’ll take the subscription AND sell your data, serve you ads
Streaming services claiming prior art here.
I just remembered there’s a black mirror episode about this. The paid subscription evolution by a “health tech” startup let’s say.
I won’t give away the plot, but it’s so realistically absurd it’s sad, hilarious and terrifying all at once.
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Sounds like my Amazon Prime subscription - now with more Ads.
Too young to remember cable TV?
cable TV would like to have a word with you :)
Pray they don’t change the terms a second time.
From what I can tell, that's already the case for these subscriptions. They give you some extra stuff but you're still getting ads, and they are still collecting your data
If you don't pay for a product, you are a less valuable product than if you'd pay for the product.
Eh, and Microsoft has shown that even if you pay they will still fuck with the product and . make it worse
Yeah this is the worst, never pay for something that has ads. It's teaching these companies it's ok.
It seems like there's no solution, then: companies will always chase the next dollar that allows them to exceed growth expectations on the earnings call. It seems like no matter what, anti-user behavior in pursuit of profit is inevitable.
Is there a solution to this?
The golden age of the internet was when it was an enthusiast's space. It is now almost entirely a corporate space, where the remaining enthusiasts' content is scraped 100K times a day and sold without attribution by the corporates.
The fediverse is a step in the right direction, and Meta charging may create another wave of converts there. It has a lot of growth pains to endure yet, but the ability to painlessly spin up your own instance could be very attractive to young people looking for their own non-corporate spaces on the internet.
We may also see some renewal via large companies (Meta in particular) imploding, from mismanagement and disenchanted users. My experience marketing a new product is that online advertising is completely ineffective now the web is filled with slop, no matter how well targeted it is. We've recently pivoted to optimise for word-of-mouth with orders of magnitude better results. I think any adtech company without a solid alternative profit stream is in for a rough ride (and no, AI is not a solid profit stream for anyone but Nvidia).
well Apple is stated as an easy counter example. They charge money for premium hardware and software. everything else is downstream. So while they could squeeze at every possible opportunity, they are less incentivized to abuse the relationship because their core proposition is: you pay money for our premium hardware and software.
it’s imperfect but contrasts this with the modern approach of grow at all costs, light money on fire and punt entirely on how to ever make money. it usually doesn’t end well for customers.
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This is just a copy of the YouTube model, to your point. It's not that you're going to get a premier experience. It's that you'll be spared from full enshittification. Only tech bros could possibly think making the default subscription level so bad that it would drive revenue. But here we are.
These products already do what basically everyone wants them to do.
The problem is now people are conditioned to having their privacy violated so they are still the product and they will pay to be the product.
The network effects with a product like WhatsApp are strong so that this opens the door to dark patterns for the non paying customers. After enough time the same level of effort will go into the now subscription app that went into it when it was free.
YouTube is a good example of this phenomenon.
The YouTube app on Android is terrible, even with the premium. Autoplay has been notoriously broken for years
I have premium and for over a month I couldn’t save videos to playlists in the app.
You’re right you’re going against the the grain it isn’t positive for the end user.
I think given that meta has already sort of destroyed so many things, it's difficult to see this measure causing any _harm_. I'm not sure it's a panacea, as since you said meta will just take your money and track you. But the "tracking you ship" has already sailed. Maybe in a perfect world the "taking your money" bit is successful enough that they try to make that experience better? Ideally, meta would just take 100% of its intellectual assets and pay to have them subducted by the Mariana Trench, but I don't think that'll be happening for me.
As Cory Doctorow is fond of saying
> The thing that determines whether you’re the product isn’t whether you’re paying for the product: it’s whether market power and regulatory forbearance allow the company to get away with selling you.
Or more simply:
> Companies don’t make you the product because you don’t pay — they make you the product because you can’t stop them.
As far as feature development goes, Meta isn't looking under the couch cushions for change. If they want to invest in a feature, they will.
Id pay money to not see ads. Like YouTube premium. And I’m sure I’m not the only one. Can’t believe they rolled out all these different plans and left out the one thing a lot of people would buy.
Does Youtube Premium track and build profiles and use and sell them? I assume so because Google, but does Premium remove advertising (in the broad sense of the business model and profiling) or remove just ads? YT in general seems "kinder" than others at a few things, like you can remove history and activity and even get a blank homescreen.
Aside: I think it's funny how with an NYT subscription, you still get not only ads, but frequent article-covering ads for NYT subscriptions (asking to upgrade to a family account).
Most of these big companies don’t actually sell your data directly, they monetize it through first party ads. If you have a well-oiled ad machine with strong first party data, selling the data just gives it to competitors, and is overall less valuable than using it for yourself.
I’d assume they’re still building that profile while you use the product, but you won’t see any ads, and can still delete the data from the various points like you’ve mentioned.
I've been considering writing a nastygram to the NYT about their nonsense popups. Every time I open their web page I get not only the family account popup, but also a "use our app, it's better!" popup.
I refuse to install your app just because you intentionally trash the web experience with popups.
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“full” premium removes all advertising, and it’s quite pricey in the US. “Lite” premium removes ‘most’ ads but doesn’t allow downloads at all.
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Someone willing and able to pay for something as frivolous as Instagram or Snapchat makes them priceless to an advertiser. They want to make it easier to identify those people.
But yeah, when Snapchat rolled out their subscription program, I was all set to buy it to get rid of the annoying ads and AI in my chat list, then I realized I could do none of that. So now I just use it a lot less, which is probably better for them anyway.
Those plans exist in Europe. Not sure if they're available elsewhere or how popular they are there
I paid for YouTube Premium until they started showing me ads for YouTube TV (and maybe YouTube Red at the time?). Cancelled and got into DNS adblocking.
Of all of the sites/apps that are immune to DNS adblocking, I thought YouTube was at the top of the list. Not that DNS adblocking isn’t a good thing, but I’d think Google & meta would make sure they couldn’t be defeated so easily.
Maybe this was something country or region specific. I don’t remember ever seeing ads for TV, Red, or other products with my US premium subscription. Now, some channels will promote specific products in their videos (like the mini ads some do for square space, nordvpn, etc), but YouTube, now has a button you can click to jump over that garbage.
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Are there ads on whatsapp? I've never seen one.
Do their subscriptions give people an ad free experience? Does it give them extra privacy?
To me it sounds like they no longer are making enough money, so now they are asking people to pay to be the product
> they no longer are making enough money
Have they ever made enough money according to their own desire?
None of the packages mention anything about removing ads do they? They're some silly premium features like custom stickers and themes. I don't see anything about removing ads.
> "if the product is free, you are the product"
I feel like this is no longer true. You are now the product regardless of you paying for it or not.
Their offer for subscribers are nothing but beads and sequins. A genuine offer [the kind i could accept] should contemplate an ad, bot and algo-free experience.
>> product managers can justify investing in features that otherwise would be passed up due to lack of revenue potential from advertising.
Like no ads? that's usually the #1 you pay for and no mention of that.
This is Meta. You will always be the product. This is like asking us to tip them in addition to all the horrible things they're doing either way.
> this is probably a positive thing for Meta products
If it was a subscription that eliminated all ads AND enshittification anti-patterns, like not putting every single notification, 'share my...' and 'show me...' option on separate toggles helpfully sub-divided into a dozen or more separate pages - I would be all in.
Seriously, what if Meta just said, in effect, "give us $XX a year" and you will be a "VIP Account" that's invisible to all our analytics systems, data collection, aggregation and profiling. The only metric where you will even be visible to our reporting systems is "VIP Account Revenue" as your payments hit our account. We will not care (or even know) if your usage is literally zero minutes a year.
I'm sure all the reasons you're thinking of for why Meta would never do this are probably correct. Those same reasons are why the reasonable-sounding thought "this does give a meaningful voice to their customers who pay" is moot. I believe there is no subscription amount Meta would accept to genuinely shift their entire way of thinking about even a small subset of users. Therefore, this much smaller subscription won't actually change anything that matters. This is just the diary farm trying to collect extra money by renting plastic stall decorations to the cows their business owns and milks. By definition these features will be trivial and purely cosmetic because anything that actually changes user behavior, would impact the real business and will be decided based on that.
Sisters, a 8B local model that hallucinates is better than that 50bn in sweaty VR shit they made. It is what it is, slap a monthly fee on the 3B model and move on, I suppose.
Aren't people here old enough to recall paying for WhatsApp's original subscription fee?
Circa 2016: https://www.techspot.com/news/63504-whatsapp-waves-goodbye-a...
I don't think anyone ever paid the whatsapp subscription fee. I remember they announced it, nobody accepted paying it and the app kept functionning and they dropped the idea.
Friends of mine did for Android or the app stopped functioning. You also had to pay a one time fee to even download it on iOS. But yeah, most users didn't have to.
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Whatsapp wasn't owned by Facebook at the time..
So, pay them to keep doing what they already do?
Yes. The difference is now the money is coming from you rather than selling your data. Which is what you want.
Of course, they could still sell your data anyway. That's why it's important to pay attention to their T&C.
The only real way to opt out is to not use 'the product'.
I miss the days where 'the product' is only what we got, and not being the victim of an executives stalking campaign.
s/rather than/as well as/g
The only way for this model to work, is for governments to put high pressure on tech giants to put the breaks on the whole surveillance & data selling business. Otherwise they will take your money and sell your data at the same time.
I wonder if fully forbidding personalised ads will actually make gdp of developed nations to shrink.
Govt won’t do it. They want that data too.
But here you are the product AND you pay for it. At least I think you still get ads and tracking…
That’d be more relatable if they weren’t actively trying to remove encryption from their messaging to spy and serve even more ads at the same time they’re trying to charge a fee for the pleasure of giving them your data to sell.
You're right it's a good thing, but I think they're maybe 10 years too late. The issue is that their product is hateful, non-functional, and my feelings toward the brand are probably more negative than any other brand I can think of. So why would I give them money? It's a tough sell.
The only truth here is that meta is preparing for the AI bot apocalypse. When everything turns into AI noise, people will move on. Segmenting real (paying) users and bots is a strategy to sustain their business model, not welfare.
There used to be a single streaming service that had the majority of the content with zero ads. Now we are back to ad-ridden cable TV pricing with nearly zero product features. Paying these shitbirds will not cause them to invest in the product. Meta isn't even generating any of the content, at least streaming services are doing that much with the money they are given.
>How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product" - well
Well, now they will keep doing what they are doing while being paid because your data is their business model.
> How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product"
This is old school. Now we know for a fact from the "enshittification" concept that you are always the product. If they can keep abusing you AND make you pay on top of that, it's better than abusing you without making you pay.
There are no good monopolies, the solution really is to fight them.
Are there ads in WhatsApp? I never saw one. Facebook, I remember a lot of ads. Instagram, probably but I don't have an account there.
Whatsapp metadata is one of the strongest signals about you. Your friends and family and your patterns of texting tells quite a bit information about you.
That's nice, but used to what end, especially if you are not a Instagram/Facebook user, and have a decent ad-blocker set up?
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There are story ads now.
> if the product is free, you are the product
I used to think like that, but then I realized that
> if you are paying for the product, nothing guarantees that you are not the product anyway
Companies like money and they will have no qualms against double dipping. Even if you refuse to be their customer (and thus they lose the revenue coming from you) as long as the majority of their customers are ok with being a product, they will keep doing it.
AI is expensive and ad revenue alone won't cover it.
> How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product" - well, the consequence of that is development resources tend to be pulled into directions that benefit advertisers.
Maybe. Or maybe this is the final stop on the route to enshittification: bill both the advertisers and the users.
That's ignoring that WhatsApp has been free for a long time and was end to end encrypted. Then a multi billion dollar corporation bought it and has slowly whittled away at it.
I have serious doubts that Meta is aiming to improve these products. Every time I open Instagram - ironically of course - it just seems like more and more AI slop.
To purchase a subscription, you need to value and trust the service. To trust the service the provider needs to show it can be trusted.
It’s Facebook. Why would anyone trust them?
C'mon, it's the oldest trick in MBA book: make a much-used service paid, make the free version of it terrible and you force people to get the paid service.
> "if the product is free, you are the product"
This is not true. You are the product whether you are paying or not.
If the company thinks they can make money by selling your data/attention/access, they will do so. Paying them does not stop them from monetizing you.
These new paid tiers will be slowly enshitified just like most modern paid plans.
You seem to be attacking a different statement that no one says: "if the product isn't free, you aren't the product". There's no "if and only if" in the maxim.
Pretty sure you agree that if the product is free, the company is definitely getting value by monetizing something else of yours. It very much is true as written.
From a formal logic standpoint, you're correct.
But the context of the parent's and grandparent's comments was (paraphrased) "if you don't pay, you're the product, therefore it makes sense to pay in this case". But given what we know of Meta and their ilk, we have good reason to believe this is absolutely NOT the case: you'll pay but you'll still be the product, and their offerings will keep on the road to enshitification. So parent comment is correct given this context.
I don't believe they were making the case that free Facebook is in any way healthy or good for you.
To me this is more like the arc of
1. Get cable TV there's no ads!
2. Everyone switches to cable
3. Cable now has ads too
Than what you describe but I feel like it's maybe more positive of a change than that. But just slightly.
In the US, cable had ads from day one. Especially considering originally it was just the OTA broadcasts bundled together.
Several of the first cable-only TV channels were ad supported from the start, and several others started including ads within a few years in.
> How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product"
As of late, not many times. Because it’s become clear that for the big players you’re the product even if you pay. See for example Netflix or Hulu, where you pay a subscription and are advertised to.
It's because you'll still be the product even if you pay.
Agreed. Nothing wrong with charging for a product.
You are paying with your data already.
Except their "impersonation protection" subscription sounds more like a racket than a product. Basically, pay us or we'll spoil your brand. Now, they want to charge point addicts for getting access to very basic and limited stats about their 2 seconds videos.
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