[vijayr]

Most of us won't think twice about dropping $5 on a shitty Starbucks coffee, but won't pay $5 for something super useful like Google search which we use every day multiple times. But on the other hand, most of these services don't even try selling a service instead of monetizing via ads, as they have trained their users to expect everything for free on the internet. So maybe people would pay, if there is a choice?

What if there is a way to pay $5/month each for Facebook, Twitter, Google Search etc in return for no tracking, no ads, so selling of data etc. FB has one billion users, if just 50M of them pay $5 per month, that is $3B in revenue per year. This 50M people can subsidize the rest of the users, who can't/won't afford $5 and are willing to see ads.

[anonred]

It doesn't work like that. Companies have already tried (see: Google Contributor) with very limited success. The reality is that you're heavily in the minority of people who care about tracking and privacy and ads. There's no market for it, and the largest analogous service, YouTube Red, explicitly needs to offer exclusive content and access to streaming media just to entice people.

[dismantlethesun]

That was voluntary and almost like charity. Subscription services would require payment.