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Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions

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Re: Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions

#231

Post by the_af »

chistev wrote: post #140
aspectop wrote: post #95

for insta and Facebook ok but for whatsapp they just wanna suck any kind of money they can. Soon whatsapp will be bloated with ads all over

Soon? They have ads already.

Interesting. There are no ads for messaging. I only use WhatsApp for messages (individual and groups). I've never used status updates or any other nonsense (I don't even understand why one would want to do status updates, but some people seem to use them).

All of this to say: ads are only in status updates and channels (no idea what this is, never used one) and apparently not in every region.

Re: Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions

#232

Post by isolatedsystem »

outime wrote: post #136
drnick1 wrote: post #46

Just stop using Meta products. It's really not as hard as it seems. Nobody needs FB to communicate with friends and family. Send texts or emails or use your phone.

>It's really not as hard as it seems Only on HN could someone post a take like this without getting laughed at. Outside our very geeky HN bubble, hardly anyone (let's say in Europe, but all my friends in the US use it as well) uses anything other than WhatsApp. There's literally zero reason for the average user to switch.

I'm in Europe, with a bunch of non-geeky friends, coming from all walks of life who have Signal installed.

As a sibling comment to yours stated, the hardest decision was deciding to stop using Meta.

I have a militant "let the leaves fall where they may" attitude towards stopping relationships with companies I detest (Microsoft, Amazon, Meta...) It all always works out fine.

Re: Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions

#234

Post by isolatedsystem »

komali2 wrote: post #214
skillina wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That statement applies to the person who won't be your friend because you don't have an Instagram, not to the person who refuses to install an arbitrary app as a precondition to becoming friends.

There's friends and there's friends. Someone might be perfectly happy being your friend, and not understanding why you never come to their parties that they advertise via the group chat on whatever platform, or insta posts or whatever. "If they cared enough they would message me directly on my obscure to normies messaging platform!" Yeah your best friend might. The greater social circle? I get it, I'm trying to get e…

There was an old YouTube video of a young guy standing around somewhere in East Asia, placards in hand, recording himself showing messages on those placards about why you should quit social media, set to Marching The Hate Machines.

It had a placard in it saying something like "You don't have 100 friends. You have like 4. And that's OK."

The more I'm getting older, the truer this has become. There is something extremely zen-like about letting the past trail away like the wake of a ship, as Watts said.

In an ideal world, those people were dear to me, and me to them, and we would all stay in touch and be one big happy family, n'importe the distance. But it takes plenty out of me just to be there for those that matter most. And for them, putting up with my quirks is burdensome but not an unscalable wall. As it is for me with their quirks in reverse.

Re: Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions

#236

Post by sdthjbvuiiijbb »

bigmadshoe wrote: post #182
tgma wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who spew I'd rather pay, I'd rather pay often majorly underestimate how expensive Google and Facebook would have to be in the western world to offset the ad revenue per person. The irony is this is especially true for you if money is no object to you, as you'd be disproportionately valuable to the ad machine. It's not going to be ten bucks folks.

You can actually look this information up! For example, Instagram makes approx $2-50 ad revenue per user per year, depending on the region. Apparently it’s highest in North America. So Of course this would get pretty expensive for all the services we use. But I personally would happily throw $100-$250 per year at my most used apps to stop being advertised to.

You've missed the point of the comment that you've replied to. There's a well known adverse selection effect because the people who would pay for no ads are exactly the people who you most want to be able to serve ads to: people with lots of disposable income, and people who are power users who see the most ads.

As a result the actual amount that they would need to charge for an ad-free version is higher than the average revenue per user, possibly significantly so.

edit: you can look at YouTube premium for an example of this in practice. It's $16/mo for no ads. That's around 2-3x or more what their revenue per user is.

Re: Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions

#237

Post by circularfoyers »

apsurd wrote: post #218
komali2 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like there's no solution, then: companies will always chase the next dollar that allows them to exceed growth expectations on the earnings call. It seems like no matter what, anti-user behavior in pursuit of profit is inevitable. Is there a solution to this?

well Apple is stated as an easy counter example. They charge money for premium hardware and software. everything else is downstream. So while they could squeeze at every possible opportunity, they are less incentivized to abuse the relationship because their core proposition is: you pay money for our premium hardware and software. it’s imperfect but contrasts this with the modern approach of grow at all costs, light…

Which sadly appears to not even be holding for them now that they decided to start displaying ads on their App Store.

Re: Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions

#238

Post by thayne »

apsurd wrote: post #112
qqtt wrote: post #98

I'm going to go against the grain here and say this is probably a positive thing for Meta products, and honestly every other "free" service to provide these kinds of revenue avenues. How many times do we hear things like "if the product is free, you are the product" - well, the consequence of that is development resources tend to be pulled into directions that benefit advertisers. By having material subscription reve…

Heard it here on HN: problem is paying a subscription is purely additive. eventually, inevitably, they’ll take the subscription AND sell your data, serve you ads, etc. it being against what your payment contract states just means they’ll reinvent and rename the tiers.

From what I can tell, that's already the case for these subscriptions. They give you some extra stuff but you're still getting ads, and they are still collecting your data

Re: Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions

#239

Post by foxylad »

komali2 wrote: post #211
apsurd wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heard it here on HN: problem is paying a subscription is purely additive. eventually, inevitably, they’ll take the subscription AND sell your data, serve you ads, etc. it being against what your payment contract states just means they’ll reinvent and rename the tiers.

It seems like there's no solution, then: companies will always chase the next dollar that allows them to exceed growth expectations on the earnings call. It seems like no matter what, anti-user behavior in pursuit of profit is inevitable. Is there a solution to this?

The golden age of the internet was when it was an enthusiast's space. It is now almost entirely a corporate space, where the remaining enthusiasts' content is scraped 100K times a day and sold without attribution by the corporates.

The fediverse is a step in the right direction, and Meta charging may create another wave of converts there. It has a lot of growth pains to endure yet, but the ability to painlessly spin up your own instance could be very attractive to young people looking for their own non-corporate spaces on the internet.

We may also see some renewal via large companies (Meta in particular) imploding, from mismanagement and disenchanted users. My experience marketing a new product is that online advertising is completely ineffective now the web is filled with slop, no matter how well targeted it is. We've recently pivoted to optimise for word-of-mouth with orders of magnitude better results. I think any adtech company without a solid alternative profit stream is in for a rough ride (and no, AI is not a solid profit stream for anyone but Nvidia).

Re: Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions

#240

Post by jakeydus »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #210
fragmede wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How's your YouTube Premium subscription?

Considering cancelling mine because they've introduced ads to it in the form of undismissable "purchase the product being discussed here" affiliate popups.

The popups are absolutely massive, too. It’s infuriating.
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