Comment by sdthjbvuiiijbb
13 hours ago
You've missed the point of the comment that you've replied to. There's a well known adverse selection effect because the people who would pay for no ads are exactly the people who you most want to be able to serve ads to: people with lots of disposable income, and people who are power users who see the most ads.
As a result the actual amount that they would need to charge for an ad-free version is higher than the average revenue per user, possibly significantly so.
edit: you can look at YouTube premium for an example of this in practice. It's $16/mo for no ads. That's around 2-3x or more what their revenue per user is.
I also think the figure GP quoted are not US, but lumped together with depressed "developed" economies. US numbers should be a multiple of that.
Fair point. I think it depends on the person. I know plenty of people without much disposable income who still pay for several subscriptions.
That's also how you get to little disposable income. It's choices people make and that's their right but it does look odd occasionally.
The amount of money you spend doesn’t affect your disposable income, just your savings (beyond calculating interest). Unless we have different definitions of income or disposable.
Advertisers don’t care about disposable income they care about spending habits even if the buyer is irresponsible and can’t afford it
Exactly, so hacker news readers are not necessarily the people who would need to be charged the most to remove advertisements. I barely shop.