[maneesh]

Hulu once wrote about how, by offering a higher cost plan without ads, they removed a lot of the complaints about their service

I've always wondered if FB offered a similar option -- $5 or $10 a month to opt out of all adds and tracking -- if a lot of the complaints about their service would also disappear.

[newscracker]

Facebook does offer a paid option for “companies”, called Workplace. IIRC, it costs $3 per active user per month. I don’t know about feature parity with the surveillance based facebook.com. Of course, Workplace cannot be used with random people that one may interact with across different spheres of life.

[xNeil]

Some did the math - the price Facebook would need to charge every user would be $11 a month. Sorry I can't remember WHERE I read it though.

[ign0ramus]

That number seems wildly off. Facebook's annual revenue for 2020 was $85.97 Billion[1]. With 2.8 Billion monthly active users, they'd need to charge $3 a month to exceed that number.

[1]: https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...

[slymon99]

In the US it's much higher. Many users provide practically no revenue to FB (presumably FB wants the growth for the future).

https://www.adexchanger.com/platforms/facebook-made-almost-2...

[xNeil]

Found the original article, I hope this helps :)

https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/15/would-it-make-us-love-or-h...

[ign0ramus]

Thanks for digging it up! It did help. As Slymon99 had pointed out, Facebook doesn't earn the same amount from each user. Something I hadn't taken into account.

[dzonga]

it's from their quarterly financial reports. rough estimate. for developing markets they generate about 2$ per user. and in developed markets like $7 per user.

[dotancohen]

When Facebook bought WhatsApp for 20 Billion USD, WhatsApp had about 1 Billion users, or slightly less. So that's at least 20 USD per user that Facebook paid.