I'm gonna go out and assert that the statement "if you're not paying, you're the product" has never been true on a large scale. Rather, the two are unrelated. I

I'm gonna go out and assert that the statement "if you're not paying, you're the product" has never been true on a large scale. Rather, the two are unrelated. In this day and age, you are always the product, whether you're paying or not. And back in the 2000s when I first started hearing that adage, it was only true on the most transparently awful platforms. It was really just a thought-terminating cliche meant to shush anyone who bothered to complain about a free website doing something bad. The difference between then and now is that we now know how to monetize somebody's data in a way that solo startup founders in the early 2000s didn't. Sure the science probably existed, but it wasn't obvious to somebody making a website that that was how you make money. Nowadays, the process of converting daily active users into monetizable data is trivial, so that's what everybody does, again regardless of whether or not you paid. When you think about the economics of it, your value as a commodity does not decrease just because you paid for something. No matter how much you pay for your subscription, your data is always valuable, and the only reason Netflix doesn't force ads on all their subscribers is because it'd look bad for them. But behind the scenes, do you really think they're not selling your interaction data just because you subscribe to the most expensive package? Monetizing users has always been a function of ease of implementation, not the out-of-pocket expense of the user.