[TimPC]

If we get enough global privacy laws with sufficient teeth, it may be possible for paid models to offer a low risk alternative to spying where you would be constantly at risk of fines for poor decisions on how you implement your data collection. It would be quite a change in the way the internet works financially, but it seems like companies would be likely to adapt to it were it to happen.

[disgruntledphd2]

The trouble with paid social media is that the value is in the network, and becomes much less attractive if lots (maybe 90% of users) don't pay, and hence are removed from the service.

You could do freemium, but you'd make a lot less money (FB would anyway, maybe this would work for Twitter) without reducing your support costs.

So yeah, I'm not sure this would work in the current setup (even global privacy laws with teeth will move from individual level ads to cohort level ads). The trouble is not that subscription services are worse, it's that ads are super profitable if you're a really big service.