Ad-free Facebook, Instagram access planned for $14 per month in Europe
Free version will remain but require consent for targeted advertising.
But will it actually be ad-free, or just personalized ad-free?
Because if it's actually ad-free, you might find a decent number of people willing to pay it. (Especially those without the technical know-how to block ads, a small fee is probably worth it to them.)
If it's just personalized ad-free, and still has generic ads, you'll have basically nobody who gives enough of a shit to pay.
as soon as possible the ad free version becomes ad light
Under the plans, which have been discussed with regulators in Brussels and Ireland, Meta would offer an ad-free version of Instagram and Facebook for those willing to pay, or a free version for those who consent to be targeted by ads based on their personal information, these people said.
I think this is showing both how much your data is worth, and what it costs to actually run / use these services. People don't want to pay, but I've always thought pay for a service was a potentially much less shitty business model. However, instead what we often get now is both pay for a service and still privacy invasion / selling our data. And who's going to trust Facebook here?
yeah same with YouTube plus: if you pay, they can sell your data at a premium, because you're in the group that can be made to pay
Except not at all. This isn't what it costs them or what your data (targeted ad views) are worth. This is what the hope a few suckers will pay them (and to get you used to the idea of extremely expensive premium services), and otherwise at least 3 (but probably more) orders of magnitude more than they'd make if you watched the ads.
All these subscriptions have the same problem: they're incredibly pricey, offer almost nothing in return (they usually still track you), and if you had to pay them all you'd have like at least a $2k hole in your budget just for subscriptions.
It just doesn't make sense.
I'm not sure that you're not underestimating the cost for these sorts of services. The only long running sort of social media (BBS) I know of that is and has been for decades straight pay for access is The WELL. And they need to charge $15 a month.
https://www.well.com/join/pricing/
Of course, they're not anywhere near the scale of Facebook, but they are similar to a mid sized fediverse server from what I can tell. I honestly think the actual thing going on is most people find value in a free service, but don't find enough value to pay what it'd cost to make it a straightforward pay for service business.
Your last question nails it. Why would you ever trust meta? And without a huge contingent of people going with you, it'd be hard to pay for a new social service that you could potentially believe won't at all profile you.
Even if it was free and ad-free I wouldn't want it.
LOL
Giving even more money to those clowns? LMAO
I understand for ad free YouTube with premium since video ads are god awful. But for FB and insta it doesn’t make sense. Who spends that much time on those platforms and even when you get ads you can just immediately skip them.
They might try make them harder to skip.
I don't know about facebook but uBlock Origin blocks ads on instagram web just fine.
They're really planning on monetizing everything. I'm curious to see how many actually pay for this.
Isn’t it the other way around? They’ve been told they can’t monetise people’s personal data without consent so they’re preparing an option to basically tell users how unappetising the paid option is, to ensure people allow their personal data to be monetised.
Lolol.
LOL... no!
I can see a lot of people being willing to pay for this, but $14 a month is shockingly high.
I don't see it coming soon, especially Instagram (younger users, potentially tik tok users) but you never know...
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Meta is preparing to charge EU users a $14 monthly subscription fee to access Instagram on their phones unless they allow the company to use their personal information for targeted ads.
Several social media platforms, which for years made all their features available for free, have recently begun to charge for extras, as their traditional ad businesses come under pressure from privacy regulations and marketers become more selective with their budgets.
Snapchat and X, formerly Twitter, also sell optional subscriptions offering paying users exclusive features, such as verified profiles, custom app themes and fewer ads.
The Silicon Valley-based company has until the end of November to comply with a Luxembourg court ruling from this year which found that Facebook “cannot justify” the use of personal data to target consumers with ads unless it gains their consent.
The Digital Markets Act, which comes into force in March, imposes new legal obligations on companies to share data with rivals to promote fair competition.
In May, Facebook, which is owned by Meta, was fined a record €1.2 billion for violating privacy laws that required appropriate safeguards of transfers of data from the EU to the US.
The original article contains 710 words, the summary contains 193 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
It finally happened.
![[HN] Ad-free Facebook, Instagram access planned for $14 per month in Europe](https://radiation.party/pictrs/image/980482ca-8a98-447f-894d-7c587ed15552.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=196)