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Comment by thekyle | Hacker News Reader

Why doesn't Facebook just introduce a paid subscription? It's not really even a novel concept at this point, we already have YouTube Premium, Reddit Premium, and rumors about a future Twitter Premium.

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Last quarter, they made $9.27 per user[1, slide 4], however that's not evenly distributed. They made $48 per user in US and Canada. But even that isn't evenly distributed.

The users who are likely to pay for the subscription are also the most valuable to advertiser because they have disposable income. Some Facebook users see ads for luxury cars, real estate, and vacations, while other users see ads for dollar stores and dropshipped junk. FB earns much more in their auction from that first set of users, but those will be the first users willing to pay to opt out of ads.

Dynamic pricing would probably offend both audiences - "what do you mean the algorithm thinks I'm worthless?" "what do you mean that I'm worth thousands of dollars to you?"

[1] https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/FB...

Yes, that's true. But your argument also applies to those other social networks I mentioned which do offer ad-free premium subscriptions, so clearly there must be some reason it's worthwhile for those companies to offer paid plans.

None of those paid options are more privacy respecting than their free variants. All you pay for is less time-wasting ads.

Uneducated guess; the revenue they get per person from tracking/profiling/ads is way above what people would consider be worth paying for the service (admin cost excluded).

And plenty of consumers would probably demand not to be profiled and have ads removed to even consider paying.

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