There's an argument that if enough people aren't willing to pay for a product to keep it in existence, it never deserved to exist in the first place. Ads are often a surreptitious way of monetizing users' personal info under the guise of giving them something for "free".
I've seen a few honest apps that have an ad-supported free version and have a ads-removed paid-for version. Facebook and co would never offer that as their entire business model is based on exploiting uninformed users.
Right because the money they could get from people who'd actually pay for Facebook is a small fraction, a rounding error of a fraction, of the money they get from stealing all your data and selling your psychological profile to advertisers. Parasites.
I wonder if this is true in the context where by international law, every social network is required to be paid for, so that there is no other option but to pay.
Do people opt out? Or, do they pay a few dollars (about the value of a facebook user)?
Any newspaper available in my city are reliant upon advertising.
Let's not forget I pay for the newspaper subscription too, it's not free to sign up.
Unfortunately some newspapers also are heavily biased in favor of those who pay their bills. See The Washington Post on any Amazon/Bezos related news after he became the owner of Democracy's death in Darkness.
True but newspaper advertising has always been untracked for obvious reasons. At most it was adjusted to the target audience of a particular paper and perhaps the type of content in the section.
It's only when the internet came along that advertisers started considering non-targeted advertising as unviable.
You mean like museums, PBS, NPR, the military, CO2 scrubbers in power plants? There are plenty of examples of obviously-good products and services that require alternative funding mechanisms for a variety of reasons, including network effects (increasing returns to scale), inability to collect small payments, and inability to track usage. Social media has elements of all of these.
It's a well studied problem that applies to a long list of markets.
If app devs charge a 30% surcharge for stuff bought on Apple stores vs other platforms I will happily pay. I already pay a premium for Apple products and I’ll happily keep doing that if Apple keeps fighting tracking by ad tech and governments.
Before mobile OS we had a far healthier approach to adware. It was just not accepted on a platform like PCs. This shit did only work because of low-information users that were locked into mobile environments in the first place. In turn, it also slowly infected PCs because expectations were eroded.
Not true. You can charge more for an iOS imitated subscription than a normal one. YouTube Premium does this IIRC. You just can’t say that it’s available cheaper outside the app. It’s scummy, but they don’t restrict you from upcharging
> while making their own equivalent data collection opt-out (vs their competitors' opt-in). Even then, Apple frames their data collection option as "Personalize your experience" while forcing other apps to use the phrase "Allow this app to track you." Apple's own ads product has tripled its market share since this launched.
If that is true, Apple is an exterminator, who wants to exterminate the current residents so they can take up residence themselves.