5 ms·

"do everything they can to monetize" Except, evidently, allow users to pay money to not be subjected to ads.

rabidrat 7y ago
This is a really good observation. What if we required all ad-based services to make available an equivalent premium offering that showed no ads? I think 99% of people would be stunned at the necessary price and would not pay it anyway, but at least it would be quantified.
- grogenaut 7y ago
  not sure this is true. Twitch has Ad Free Turbo, it's about $15/month. Youtube had Red, similar price. Both have customers. The real issue is that with google or FB I don't know that I'm not still being sold all over the place. I only know with Twitch because I work there. Also Youtube has been ratcheting up the ads like crazy lately, and I'm very sure red isn't worth it for me personally.
  - rvnx 7y ago
    Well you know, your data is not directly sold. Your data with Google just as part of targeting campaigns ("User is high spender in Google") or equivalent in DoubleClick and Twitch/Amazon is on its way. If you prefer, we don't give to someone the info that IP A.B.C.D but we sell the possibility to target IP A.B.C.D with an ad. It's not "selling" data, but still monetizing it.
- beefield 7y ago
  This is one of the more important regulations big tech should be subjected to in my opinion. Let me pay for the services I use, with believable guarantees that my data is not used or sold in any way by the service provider. And regulate the cost to be a reasonable margin over production costs of these services. Hosting my hosting my posts and photos should not be that expensive.
  - EGreg 7y ago
    “believable guarantees” lol If it can be scraped and stored, FB will do it just because. And then apologize if caught, but keep storing it. Because why not? They figure, if it can be stored, someone is doing it. They can take every advantage they can get for their “friends you may know...” and user retention.
    - beefield 7y ago
      It's not that difficult if there is a will. Just let big tech know that if they break this law, they are going to be fined all the way to bankrupty without hesitation. Once shareholders have lost their money, government as the biggest debtor will sell the company back to market. Couple of rounds of this and even the more stubborn company starts to think differently.
    - Nextgrid 7y ago
      If they’re forced to offer a paid tier without ads for a fixed price then their incentive would be to do so in the most profitable way possible by reducing engineering overheads & the cost of storing that data. Currently they do it because they assume there’s a correlation between the extents to which they violate your privacy and revenue. If the revenue is locked static then this breaks down and the incentives change.
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    I've seen lots of people say this but like maybe a fraction of people use GSuite like I do (even my phone number is on my GSuite). Big talk from HN usually. Maybe you'll do it but a fraction of people do. There are no ads in GSuite mail. So you take the fraction of people who will do that and see if it's worth building. Answer: it's not worth it for practically anyone. It's like building a Bitcoin integration. Everyone "would buy if it would accept Bitcoin" but come on, no one is actually in that narrow space of utility where the difference in buying is adding Bitcoin or not. If you guys build software maybe you'll see it yourself. Go ahead and try it. Maybe one in five hundred of you will see positive results.
    - 7y ago
- RandallBrown 7y ago
  Google used to have a service where you set a monthly spend and it would basically bid for ad space, using your money. Instead of displaying the actual ads, it would display an image of your choosing. It was a pretty great idea and I can't remember what it was called, but it's no longer around as far as I can tell. Something like that on any ad supported platform would be pretty neat.
  - trishmapow2 7y ago
    Are you referring to this? https://contributor.google.com/v/beta https://contributor.google.com/v/beta I've heard it mentioned here and there, seems like it shut down in 2016 and restarted in 2017.
- asaddhamani 7y ago
  > I think 99% of people would be stunned at the necessary price and would not pay it anyway Please back this up with some actual numbers, because they're not as high as you're making people believe they'd be. I am happily paying for YouTube Premium just because I don't get interrupted by ads. In India, their premium costs less than $2 per month. That price is very justifiable for me (And their ARPU is ~$9/yr btw, so they are making 2 times as much from me than they were before by showing me ads). According to this site (https://www.statista.com/statistics/234056/facebooks-average-advertising-revenue-per-user/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/234056/facebooks-average...), Facebook had an ARPU of $25 (average, higher per user in US and EU, lower in APAC) per year in 2018. Which is $2 per month. If they promise no ads (and associated tracking), I will pay three times that amount each month. I think a lot of us on HN would be willing to pay these prices to support the ad-supported services we use if the option was available (and the pricing was reasonable).
a13n 7y ago
Wouldn't work. Users who are willing to pay to make ads go away are the most valuable audience for advertisers because they have money to spend. Therefore FB would have to charge a TON of money to make up for their billions in lost ads revenue, and nobody would pay that amount anyway.
- dx034 7y ago
  Not sure about that. I just think that so few people would be willing to pay for it that it's just not worth the effort. Introducing billing brings administrative costs and requires more support. Sure, the HN crowd would maybe pay for ad free facebook, but ads don't seem to be that unpopular for most people.
  - dhimes 7y ago
    It introduces far, far less overhead than advertising does though, so I bet they could handle it. Especially if they did $5/mo and essentially doubled the profits from these people.
- jvzr 7y ago
  I am willing to pay, but I very strongly despise ads. I'm not sure I have value for advertisers, as I never click on ads. In fact I'm pretty sure advertisers are wasting money on me, and Facebook is quite happy to continue charging them anyway
- jedberg 7y ago
  Reddit lets people pay to not see ads. It's $6/mo.
  - feu 7y ago
    Reddit is not, by all accounts, a profitable company.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
  Seems to have worked out fine for YouTube (Premium subscriber here).
matheusmoreira 7y ago
Wouldn't work. Spending money on anything puts people on the disposable income demographic which is the exact audience the advertisers want to reach. It's impossible to reach a workable compromise with the advertising industry. They don't care about our convenience and would place ads under our eyelids if they could get away with it. The truth is we're way past the point of peaceful negotiation with the advertising industry. Better to unconditionally block everything and hope they go bankrupt. Besides, making users pay money to avoid ads is just insulting. Blockers exist because of the sheer amount of abuse they perpetrate in order to serve their useless noise. People should not have to pay extortion money in order to avoid the abuse. The abuse should simply not happen in the first place.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  > Spending money on anything puts people on the disposable income demographic which is the exact audience the advertisers want to reach. Why do we care what advertisers want? Use regulation to force ad-funded companies to allow people to pay the average revenue per user to opt-out of ads and forbid using the fact they’re paying as a signal to raise prices.
  - magduf 7y ago
    >Why do we care what advertisers want? Use regulation to force ad-funded companies to allow people to... Why should the government care what users want? How much money are users going to pay for lobbyists to lobby for this regulation you desire? None, of course. But advertisers will happily pay lots of money to lobby congresspeople to keep the laws advertiser-friendly.
- jaywalk 7y ago
  There are plenty of abusive ads out there, no doubt. But I wouldn't place Facebook ads in that category. They've actually been extremely restrained compared to a lot of what's out there, including video ads on Instagram.

This is a really good observation. What if we required all ad-based services to make available an equivalent premium offering that showed no ads? I think 99% of people would be stunned at the necessary price and would not pay it anyway, but at least it would be quantified.

grogenaut 7y ago
not sure this is true. Twitch has Ad Free Turbo, it's about $15/month. Youtube had Red, similar price. Both have customers. The real issue is that with google or FB I don't know that I'm not still being sold all over the place. I only know with Twitch because I work there. Also Youtube has been ratcheting up the ads like crazy lately, and I'm very sure red isn't worth it for me personally.
- rvnx 7y ago
  Well you know, your data is not directly sold. Your data with Google just as part of targeting campaigns ("User is high spender in Google") or equivalent in DoubleClick and Twitch/Amazon is on its way. If you prefer, we don't give to someone the info that IP A.B.C.D but we sell the possibility to target IP A.B.C.D with an ad. It's not "selling" data, but still monetizing it.
beefield 7y ago
This is one of the more important regulations big tech should be subjected to in my opinion. Let me pay for the services I use, with believable guarantees that my data is not used or sold in any way by the service provider. And regulate the cost to be a reasonable margin over production costs of these services. Hosting my hosting my posts and photos should not be that expensive.
- EGreg 7y ago
  “believable guarantees” lol If it can be scraped and stored, FB will do it just because. And then apologize if caught, but keep storing it. Because why not? They figure, if it can be stored, someone is doing it. They can take every advantage they can get for their “friends you may know...” and user retention.
  - beefield 7y ago
    It's not that difficult if there is a will. Just let big tech know that if they break this law, they are going to be fined all the way to bankrupty without hesitation. Once shareholders have lost their money, government as the biggest debtor will sell the company back to market. Couple of rounds of this and even the more stubborn company starts to think differently.
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    If they’re forced to offer a paid tier without ads for a fixed price then their incentive would be to do so in the most profitable way possible by reducing engineering overheads & the cost of storing that data. Currently they do it because they assume there’s a correlation between the extents to which they violate your privacy and revenue. If the revenue is locked static then this breaks down and the incentives change.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  I've seen lots of people say this but like maybe a fraction of people use GSuite like I do (even my phone number is on my GSuite). Big talk from HN usually. Maybe you'll do it but a fraction of people do. There are no ads in GSuite mail. So you take the fraction of people who will do that and see if it's worth building. Answer: it's not worth it for practically anyone. It's like building a Bitcoin integration. Everyone "would buy if it would accept Bitcoin" but come on, no one is actually in that narrow space of utility where the difference in buying is adding Bitcoin or not. If you guys build software maybe you'll see it yourself. Go ahead and try it. Maybe one in five hundred of you will see positive results.
  - 7y ago
RandallBrown 7y ago
Google used to have a service where you set a monthly spend and it would basically bid for ad space, using your money. Instead of displaying the actual ads, it would display an image of your choosing. It was a pretty great idea and I can't remember what it was called, but it's no longer around as far as I can tell. Something like that on any ad supported platform would be pretty neat.
- trishmapow2 7y ago
  Are you referring to this? https://contributor.google.com/v/beta https://contributor.google.com/v/beta I've heard it mentioned here and there, seems like it shut down in 2016 and restarted in 2017.
asaddhamani 7y ago
> I think 99% of people would be stunned at the necessary price and would not pay it anyway Please back this up with some actual numbers, because they're not as high as you're making people believe they'd be. I am happily paying for YouTube Premium just because I don't get interrupted by ads. In India, their premium costs less than $2 per month. That price is very justifiable for me (And their ARPU is ~$9/yr btw, so they are making 2 times as much from me than they were before by showing me ads). According to this site (https://www.statista.com/statistics/234056/facebooks-average-advertising-revenue-per-user/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/234056/facebooks-average...), Facebook had an ARPU of $25 (average, higher per user in US and EU, lower in APAC) per year in 2018. Which is $2 per month. If they promise no ads (and associated tracking), I will pay three times that amount each month. I think a lot of us on HN would be willing to pay these prices to support the ad-supported services we use if the option was available (and the pricing was reasonable).

a13n 7y ago

Wouldn't work. Users who are willing to pay to make ads go away are the most valuable audience for advertisers because they have money to spend. Therefore FB would have to charge a TON of money to make up for their billions in lost ads revenue, and nobody would pay that amount anyway.

dx034 7y ago
Not sure about that. I just think that so few people would be willing to pay for it that it's just not worth the effort. Introducing billing brings administrative costs and requires more support. Sure, the HN crowd would maybe pay for ad free facebook, but ads don't seem to be that unpopular for most people.
- dhimes 7y ago
  It introduces far, far less overhead than advertising does though, so I bet they could handle it. Especially if they did $5/mo and essentially doubled the profits from these people.
jvzr 7y ago
I am willing to pay, but I very strongly despise ads. I'm not sure I have value for advertisers, as I never click on ads. In fact I'm pretty sure advertisers are wasting money on me, and Facebook is quite happy to continue charging them anyway
jedberg 7y ago
Reddit lets people pay to not see ads. It's $6/mo.
- feu 7y ago
  Reddit is not, by all accounts, a profitable company.
SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
Seems to have worked out fine for YouTube (Premium subscriber here).

matheusmoreira 7y ago

Wouldn't work. Spending money on anything puts people on the disposable income demographic which is the exact audience the advertisers want to reach. It's impossible to reach a workable compromise with the advertising industry. They don't care about our convenience and would place ads under our eyelids if they could get away with it. The truth is we're way past the point of peaceful negotiation with the advertising industry. Better to unconditionally block everything and hope they go bankrupt. Besides, making users pay money to avoid ads is just insulting. Blockers exist because of the sheer amount of abuse they perpetrate in order to serve their useless noise. People should not have to pay extortion money in order to avoid the abuse. The abuse should simply not happen in the first place.

Nextgrid 7y ago
> Spending money on anything puts people on the disposable income demographic which is the exact audience the advertisers want to reach. Why do we care what advertisers want? Use regulation to force ad-funded companies to allow people to pay the average revenue per user to opt-out of ads and forbid using the fact they’re paying as a signal to raise prices.
- magduf 7y ago
  >Why do we care what advertisers want? Use regulation to force ad-funded companies to allow people to... Why should the government care what users want? How much money are users going to pay for lobbyists to lobby for this regulation you desire? None, of course. But advertisers will happily pay lots of money to lobby congresspeople to keep the laws advertiser-friendly.
jaywalk 7y ago
There are plenty of abusive ads out there, no doubt. But I wouldn't place Facebook ads in that category. They've actually been extremely restrained compared to a lot of what's out there, including video ads on Instagram.