this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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113/3 = about $38 per user per year
14*12 = $168 per user per year
Which would be a mark-up (a Zuck-up?) of 342%.
You do have to figure though, that it’s only the most active users who will opt to pay $14/month, and it’s those same highly-active users that contribute the most to the ad revenue.
Having no idea how those stats actually break down, we could take a wild guess and do a Pareto Principle 80/20.
Say the top 20% active users constitute 80% of the ad revenue, and those same top 20% all switch to the paid model:
(113*0.8)/(3*0.2) = about $151 per VIP user per year
…which is a lot closer to the $168. Zuck-up of about 11%.
80/20 is probably cutting them too much slack, but the real markup is probably closer to 11% than it is to 342%.
This is also not factoring the extra operational expense of supporting the new model.
—
Math part over, here’s my take:
This is good.
Ad-based models are toxic. We poisoned our culture, bulldozed our privacy, distorted the economy, gave unfathomable power to immature narcissistic opportunists, and underdeveloped public FOSS tech because we expected privately-owned services to be Free™ even though they could never be literally free.
This is a move towards unmasking these services and revealing the real economic gears whizzing around behind them.
The more people understand what their privacy and autonomy is worth to these companies, the more they might insist on keeping it — and maybe even seek out places where they don’t have to pay for the privilege.
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Sources:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/268604/annual-revenue-of-facebook
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/
This is not good. I don’t get how people still have good faith in big business. Here’s what’s going to happen, we will be moving towards a pay for service WITH ads. And data mining.
It’s not one or the other here. People somehow think it’s either a) “pay for the service” OR b) “have your personal data raped and parcelled out to the highest bidder.” It’s not. It’s not either a or b, it’s either b or a AND b.
So I have to pay to be tracked?
And you know once everyone acclimates to the new pricing, it’s going to be “hey we are adding a new plan for $9 that has ads and all the telemetry. Oh, we are also raising the rates.”
The real problem is the entire company is rotten. I don’t understand why people think a pay wall won’t make that the case.
Good to note that this isn't even hypothetical, it literally happened with cable. First it was ad-funded, then you paid to get rid of ads, then you paid exorbitant prices to get fed ads, and the final evolution was being required to pay $100+ for bundles including channels you'd never use to get at the one you would. It's already happening to streaming services too, which have started to bundle.
I don’t understand why more people just can see this? To me it’s connect the dots. Paint by numbers.
Big business is your enemy. I don’t know why folks still have faith in such a fucked up system that’s got a proven track record of being shit.