[jerf]

If this were to become a major income for Facebook or any similar company, the economic calculus would change such that all the tracking becomes an expense that doesn't generate a return (since we can't use it to serve ads). If this program succeeds and goes the distance it will eventually come to someone's attention that they can cut their costs quite significantly by stopping tracking subscribers beyond the minimum required to implement the non-tracking.

It won't happen overnight and it won't happen if this is always a fringe use case not worth worrying about.

This also impacts some of the revenue analysis other people have posted. If Facebook makes a bit less money on someone but can cut their costs by more, Facebook can still come out ahead with a subscription. Obviously this won't be true right out of the gate because they won't be able to rely on it initially, but possibly in the future this may impact things.

I mean, after all, if you cut out the immense spend they're making to throw ads at you, how much would it actually cost to provide the "good" part of Facebook's services to an average user? It really isn't much and it continues to drop.

[xnx]

> I mean, after all, if you cut out the immense spend they're making to throw ads at you, how much would it actually cost to provide the "good" part of Facebook's services to an average user? It really isn't much and it continues to drop.

I've often wondered about this. A social network could be operated quite inexpensively if you didn't have to pay for sales, marketing, attention hacking, etc. (Twitter is kind of testing this hypothesis.) Social networks should be as boring and everyday as blogs and email.