[petesergeant]

> meta earned $17 per north american user in 2011

I always find the economics around this annoying. I’d gladly pay $17 a year — hell ten times that — to not see ads on Instagram. However, the fact that I can and would pay for that means that Meta can’t afford to lose me, because it kills the value of their audience.

[lloeki]

You can pay and get untargeted ads. That there is no option to pay and not get ads at all is a testament that the value goes beyond the individual cost.

[Anon1096]

The very next bullet is

> $233 in 2024. 13x in 13 years

So yes you would in fact need to pay ten times that and then some. And by virtue of being on hacker news I'm guessing your actual ads targeting value is more like 20x that or more.

[3962ea18007c]

Watching ads is literally the purpose of those kinda apps though. What else would you do there if not watching ads? People love ads