[mattbrewsbytes]

Why don't they just come out with a subscription version of Facebook? $40/year for no ads, no data miners or data sharing and a customizable "news" feed (e.g. no shared posts from crazy Uncle, prioritize family, etc.)

Some percentage of users will do that. If 1% of 2 billion users choose it, then they get $800 million per year.

It seems logical if people don't like being the product, let them pay for the product, right?

[loceng]

I've always had the thought that the reason is likely that if you have the money to pay for $40/year then you're likely potentially worth more to advertisers, and therefore they wouldn't want to give an option/leak to exclude the most valuable eyeballs from advertisers.

[dfxm12]

$40/year for no ads, no data miners or data sharing...

As a point of reference, if you're in the US or Canada, Facebook would be losing money on this model, according to info on their investors' site [0].

0 - https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_presentations/FB-Q... (search for Average Revenue per User)

[mattbrewsbytes]

Ok those numbers wouldn't work out. I picked $40/yr since it sounded reasonable.

Maybe this is an opportunity for a startup to create a paid social media platform?

[forgottenpass]

If they get $40/user through ads, and thought they could get $40 out of pocket, they'd be making $80/user by doing both.

Where did the meme that paying for a product means they won't advertise or sell your data come from? Everyone is aware of cable TV's business model, right?

[nealdt]

I feel the same and was happy to pay the $1 to WhatsApp, until that changed. I can only imagine that FB values its unfettered access to you and your data as worth more than $40 or double that!

[jerf]

Facebook revenue 2017: 40.7 billion. [1] Facebook 2017 user count: 2.2 billion. [2]

A simple division doesn't tell the whole story, but gets us into ballpark territory, call it $20/user/year. It's probably something power-distribution-ish, with a few whales clicking on the most profitable scams and mesothelioma ads, and a long tail of people who are below average. Much like with what network TV actually makes per eyeball-second, it's actually shockingly easy to outbid advertisers.

One of the reasons I kinda look askance at the whole advertising ecosystem is precisely that it seems like nobody is even trying anything else despite the fact it seems like it ought to be a very swift and huge boost to Facebook's real revenues and stock price if they could convince people to give them $50/year. The obvious offer to me would be some sort of all-inclusive cloud storage service for photos or something, which, I mean, they're already doing. The fact that this seems to be unthinkable is what makes me start giving a bit more credence to the idea that there truly is some sort of ulterior motive at play here. Even just "here's $34.99 for the year, facebook, remove the damned ads! and now that you don't need it, stop tracking me" would probably make them a shitton of cash, even without any other changes like giving you back more control over your feed now that you've removed their incentives to manipulate it for their own advertising gain. Where's all that notorious capitalistic greed?

And suppose we were living in an alternate universe where that was an option... how different would the news stories of the past week look? There's non-monetary reasons for this too.

(Compare with Netflix, for instance. I pay them real money. They get lots of real preference data. It would totally be "monetizable" levels of detail. But there's basically nothing they could possibly do with that data that's worth more than the ~$150/year I give them, and trying to start stuffing ads in my face runs a marginal risk that I'll just leave that is probably not worth it. Maybe when Facebook first came out, subscriptions were out of the question, but they are clearly an option now.)

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-...

[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...