I guess this is a fair indication then of how much Meta receives per person from advertisers...

This might be unpopular, but here goes nothing:

With the correct and fitting (and fair) regulations, oversight by the government and accountabilit, this is a correct and more ethical decision.

Stuff costs money. For now. Infrastructure, wages, repairs, fixes, improvements, new features.

All these things dont come free and we only pay nothing DIRECTLY, because we pay in data, attention and privacy violations.

By fixing this issue, the access to all these things can be secured without the plattform falling appart or having to resort to invasive data harvesting. We could even make these practices illegal, because plattforms would not just die then.

And no, the price should not be so high to generate profit for the executives. Thats why regulation is so important.

In the Modern Age we live in, Social Media is at this point akin to an essential service and should therefore be regulated as such: No profit, but stable maintenance and secure access free from monetary interest for everyone equally.

Lol, thanks for helping convince all my relatives and friends to finally leave Facebook then, Facebook. Couldn't think of a better incentive myself.

So they're admitting regulations work. They are making a lot less money due to random ads instead of targeting ads so they will have to charge to be sure they are still making too much.

I can't wait for the next regulations against tech corporations and social media.

Who would have thought that all those copy/pased chain posts from yesteryear were on to something:

IT IS OFFICIAL. IT WAS EVEN ON THE NEWS. FACEBOOK WILL START CHARGING DUE TO THE NEW PROFILE CHANGES. IF YOU COPY THIS ON YOUR WALL YOUR ICON WILL TURN BLUE AND FACEBOOK WILL BE FREE FOR YOU. PLEASE PASS THIS MESSAGE ON, IF NOT YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE DELETED IF YOU DO NOT PAY

I have a much cheaper method of avoiding personalised ads on Facebook and Instagram.

STOP USING FACEBOOK AND INSTAGRAM.

Please do it. It will die so fast

Very X of you, facebook

Go for it. Really.

Do they really think their service is worth 12-15 bucks a month?

Maybe enshittification is actually a good thing. Hear me out: the worse things get, the more motivated people are to ask questions, migrate to alternatives, build better platforms, and hopefully 1) enact well-informed legislation, and 2) prevent what appears to be this "necessity" of enshittification from continuing to happen in an endless cycle.

Are they going to tell all the websites (with Facebook trackers) to stop tracking you when you pay? I highly doubt it.

No they won't.

I'll take the "or else" option, please.

Well, now we'll see if the EU finally pulls its head out of their ass and clarifies that no, "consent" gained this way isn't "freely given", or if they legalize the practice and make GDPR even more of a joke.

Various DPAs have taken different positions on this, unfortunately encouraging this practice.

Do you want to kill your business? Cause this is how you kill your business.

14$ per month looks pretty expensive.

Does anyone realise how expensive that is? I reckon you could run a lemmy or mastodon instance charging users 1% of that.

Still there will be some losers out there who'll pay that $14/month because they are loyal corp simps

in 2022, advertising revenue amounted to close to 113 billion U.S. dollars whereas payments and other fees revenues amounted to around two billion U.S. dollars.

With roughly three billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2023, Facebook is the most used online social network worldwide.

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.

—

Sources:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/268604/annual-revenue-of-facebook

https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/

Cool. Btw, when do you fix your share buttons? They're still tracking without consent, right?

All that's going to do is incentivize a federated alternative.

But I was supposed to be the product!

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/star-wars-memes/images/6/6d/Dew-it-galactic-republic.gif/revision/latest?cb=20211018230421

I would love for everyone to have a legit and easy to understand reason to fuck off from Meta. Also make Whatsapp cost something per message! Twitter should try it too.

I hope that also includes WhatsApp. Europeans are addicted to that shit.

So your personal data is essentially worth about $14 a month.

You are worth about $200 a year to advertising companies per service. What a scam.

Can I just start selling my own data on the internet for a subscription fee? Might as well capitalize on my boring lige.

I can't imagine anyone paying for this.

Do not threaten me with a good time not paying for things I don't need, young man

Earlier this year, I made a small experiment: I stopped checking my Facebook for three months. During that time, I received about 250 notifications of new posts by my friends. When I logged back in, out of the first 100 posts on my feed, 24 were from my friends and another 7 from groups I subscribed to. The rest were ads or "suggested" content. Checking my feed every day after that, I averaged 2 posts from my friends and 2 from my groups in the top 20 posts. I have since stopped checking Facebook altogether, and by this time I don't think even anonymized ads will get me back.