[scottLobster]

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.

[kaesar14]

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.

[mensetmanusman]

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)?

[MomoXenosaga]

This is what newspapers learned. They thought the internet was a paradigm shift at first.

Turns out there is a group of affluent folks willing to pay for quality journalism- as it has been the case for 400 years.

[gowld]

Please name 3 advertising-free newspapers.

[throwaway946513]

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.

[GekkePrutser]

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.

[mgraczyk]

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem