[michaelchisari]

That's for Facebook broadly, which is a beast of a corporation that encompasses dozens of services and properties. I'm talking about instagram specifically.

those will be the first users willing to pay to opt out of ads.

The service would have to be built from the ground-up to not have a free option, it would have to be equalized across all users. Again, this is where the difficulty lies in an economy that already offers so much for free.

IF someone could pull it off, they would benefit from the gym membership effect of people keeping the subscription while barely using the service (and it's resources).

There would also be considerable savings on the engineering and sales side if you cut all adtech out of the equation and provide a simple time-series feed.