Meta wants to charge EU users $14 a month if they don't agree to personalized ads on Facebook and Instagram

I guess this is a fair indication then of how much Meta receives per person from advertisers...

This might be unpopular, but here goes nothing:

With the correct and fitting (and fair) regulations, oversight by the government and accountabilit, this is a correct and more ethical decision.

Stuff costs money. For now. Infrastructure, wages, repairs, fixes, improvements, new features.

All these things dont come free and we only pay nothing DIRECTLY, because we pay in data, attention and privacy violations.

By fixing this issue, the access to all these things can be secured without the plattform falling appart or having to resort to invasive data harvesting. We could even make these practices illegal, because plattforms would not just die then.

And no, the price should not be so high to generate profit for the executives. Thats why regulation is so important.

In the Modern Age we live in, Social Media is at this point akin to an essential service and should therefore be regulated as such: No profit, but stable maintenance and secure access free from monetary interest for everyone equally.

Lol, thanks for helping convince all my relatives and friends to finally leave Facebook then, Facebook. Couldn't think of a better incentive myself.

So they're admitting regulations work. They are making a lot less money due to random ads instead of targeting ads so they will have to charge to be sure they are still making too much.

I can't wait for the next regulations against tech corporations and social media.

Who would have thought that all those copy/pased chain posts from yesteryear were on to something:

IT IS OFFICIAL. IT WAS EVEN ON THE NEWS. FACEBOOK WILL START CHARGING DUE TO THE NEW PROFILE CHANGES. IF YOU COPY THIS ON YOUR WALL YOUR ICON WILL TURN BLUE AND FACEBOOK WILL BE FREE FOR YOU. PLEASE PASS THIS MESSAGE ON, IF NOT YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE DELETED IF YOU DO NOT PAY

I have a much cheaper method of avoiding personalised ads on Facebook and Instagram.

STOP USING FACEBOOK AND INSTAGRAM.

Please do it. It will die so fast

Very X of you, facebook

Go for it. Really.

Do they really think their service is worth 12-15 bucks a month?

Maybe enshittification is actually a good thing. Hear me out: the worse things get, the more motivated people are to ask questions, migrate to alternatives, build better platforms, and hopefully 1) enact well-informed legislation, and 2) prevent what appears to be this "necessity" of enshittification from continuing to happen in an endless cycle.

Are they going to tell all the websites (with Facebook trackers) to stop tracking you when you pay? I highly doubt it.

No they won't.

I'll take the "or else" option, please.

Well, now we'll see if the EU finally pulls its head out of their ass and clarifies that no, "consent" gained this way isn't "freely given", or if they legalize the practice and make GDPR even more of a joke.

Various DPAs have taken different positions on this, unfortunately encouraging this practice.

Do you want to kill your business? Cause this is how you kill your business.

14$ per month looks pretty expensive.

in 2022, advertising revenue amounted to close to 113 billion U.S. dollars whereas payments and other fees revenues amounted to around two billion U.S. dollars.

With roughly three billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2023, Facebook is the most used online social network worldwide.

113/3 = about $38 per user per year

14*12 = $168 per user per year

Which would be a mark-up (a Zuck-up?) of 342%.

You do have to figure though, that it’s only the most active users who will opt to pay $14/month, and it’s those same highly-active users that contribute the most to the ad revenue.

Having no idea how those stats actually break down, we could take a wild guess and do a Pareto Principle 80/20.

Say the top 20% active users constitute 80% of the ad revenue, and those same top 20% all switch to the paid model:

(113*0.8)/(3*0.2) = about $151 per VIP user per year

…which is a lot closer to the $168. Zuck-up of about 11%.

80/20 is probably cutting them too much slack, but the real markup is probably closer to 11% than it is to 342%.

This is also not factoring the extra operational expense of supporting the new model.

—

Math part over, here’s my take:

This is good.

Ad-based models are toxic. We poisoned our culture, bulldozed our privacy, distorted the economy, gave unfathomable power to immature narcissistic opportunists, and underdeveloped public FOSS tech because we expected privately-owned services to be Free™ even though they could never be literally free.

This is a move towards unmasking these services and revealing the real economic gears whizzing around behind them.

The more people understand what their privacy and autonomy is worth to these companies, the more they might insist on keeping it — and maybe even seek out places where they don’t have to pay for the privilege.

—

Sources:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/268604/annual-revenue-of-facebook

https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/

Still there will be some losers out there who'll pay that $14/month because they are loyal corp simps

Does anyone realise how expensive that is? I reckon you could run a lemmy or mastodon instance charging users 1% of that.

Cool. Btw, when do you fix your share buttons? They're still tracking without consent, right?

All that's going to do is incentivize a federated alternative.

But I was supposed to be the product!

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I hope that also includes WhatsApp. Europeans are addicted to that shit.

Do not threaten me with a good time not paying for things I don't need, young man

I can't imagine anyone paying for this.

So your personal data is essentially worth about $14 a month.

You are worth about $200 a year to advertising companies per service. What a scam.

Can I just start selling my own data on the internet for a subscription fee? Might as well capitalize on my boring lige.

Earlier this year, I made a small experiment: I stopped checking my Facebook for three months. During that time, I received about 250 notifications of new posts by my friends. When I logged back in, out of the first 100 posts on my feed, 24 were from my friends and another 7 from groups I subscribed to. The rest were ads or "suggested" content. Checking my feed every day after that, I averaged 2 posts from my friends and 2 from my groups in the top 20 posts. I have since stopped checking Facebook altogether, and by this time I don't think even anonymized ads will get me back.

First they manipulate their algorithms so that small businesses lose almost all visibility... Except when buying ads.

Now this?

Does that actually mean businesses won't even reach their potential customers with paid ads anymore?

Sounds great. I stopped using Facebook years ago. This can only bring their demise faster.

$14 a month is insanely. maybe 1 dollar a month is reasonable. given they'll still be working their ads into 80% of the bullshit that is Facebook feeds.

They seem to have copied the approach from multiple European newspapers that consists to disable tracking if you subscribe. And unfortunately most data protection agencies seem okay with that.

It infuriates me that you have to pay for the basic right to not be tracked, given that you already have to be particularly tech-literate to avoid tracking by yourself...

So you give them $14 and hope, they don't sell your data? I never had a facebook/whatsapp account and never will and I know why.

This shit gets any hotter I just might hop out

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Ad targeting should just be banned outright. It serves noone and creates huge pools of easy to abuse data.

He really wants to sink that ship, doesn't he?

Here I should say that you can always donate money to good services like lemmy, mastodon, peertube or important organizations like FSF, EFF.org(if you are in USA), Linux Foudation, X.org(wayland is part of it too).

No joke that would be great for privacy and putting users first. Users would go the product to the customers and the platform would actually need to cater to them.

The same would happen with Twitter.

Now, social media depends on its massive size, so even if makes the platform more user-centric, it would reduce the amount of users and reduce its value.

Could you EU people turn that around and charge fuckzuck 14 euros for every month you've kept your account, as that's the apparent value of your profile?

I feel like this is short-sighted on Meta's part. Since it sounds like they will still serve paid users non-personalized ads, I think they'd be better off losing a little revenue on those users who actually make the effort to turn off ad personalization. Otherwise they are going to lose users over this which is going to make Facebook just that much less relevant for the people who are willing to use it with personalized ads or pay to ONLY get non-personalized ads.

Part of the reason that their service is popular is that it has huge market share. Every time they shave off a segment of their user base Facebook becomes that much less relevant for everyone.

Are they going to stop allowing people to edit their own interests too? What's the difference between not allowing personalization, and regularly clearing out their "collection" of your perceived interests?

I am not convinced this gets them off the hook. But I'll assume he has better lawyers than me. What it does show, is the value of forcing people to provide data to provide personalized ads.

Honestly I'd pay 5 euros for instagram without ads. Just because it's a popular channel for friends and artists I follow and the ads in the timeline are making the whole experience so difficult.

14 is a lot though unless you work with these platforms.

“It's free and always will be”

"personalized" ads. So does this mean if you pay $14 a month you'll still get the exact same amount of ads but they just won't be personalized? LOL

I see that Mark wants to follow in Elon's footsteps. Burn it to the ground!

I'd like to see them try.

Let's not forget that paying for an ad free experience requires providing personal info on yourself that Facebook may not have. Same applies to tiktok which is testing ad free subscription.

I hope this move will drive people away from degenerate Instagram and Facebook...

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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Meta has a new plan to navigate the European Union's tough new ad privacy rules – charge users $14 a month.

The tech giant is considering getting customers in Europe to pay monthly subscription fees to use Instagram and Facebook if they don't agree to let Meta use their data to serve them ads, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

The bloc's regulators ruled last year that Meta must give users the option to opt out of personalized ads based on their activity on their platforms.

Showing ads based on user engagement is an integral part of Meta's business model, but it's one that has come under increasing pressure over the past few years.

The potential subscription tiers are the latest sign of how Europe's tough regulatory approach is forcing tech giants to make major changes to their businesses.

Meta was handed a $1.3 billion fine by European regulators for data privacy violations in May, and the company also delayed the launch of its Twitter competitor Threads in Europe over regulatory uncertainty.

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The original article contains 343 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 49%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Surprise surprise

They're missing the damned point. I have never used Facebook, but on any service if I'm paying a monthly fee it is to remove myself from the ad-based enshitification.

It's also what drives me crazy with respect to Microsoft products. I pay for MS 365, and I'd even be willing to pay for Windows if they'd leave me the fuck alone. I pay for ProtonMail and they do leave me alone, so I'll always stick with them. Any app that I use for which I can pay to remove ads, I do it... unless it's a subscription and I can't quite justify the perpetual expense, like for my preferred weather app MyRadar.

Hell, I almost bought into the MyRadar investment pitch until I saw that giving them $400 still wouldn't net me a lifetime subscription.

How about giving people a form for them to fill what kind of ads they want to see instead of spying on them to personalize ad

Active users go brrrrrrt thpppppt

Lol. Do that.

finally a good reason to tell to my friends to unistall

We are nearing the end

$14/mo is a bit steep, but back when I actually used Facebook, I’d have dropped $5/mo to not have any ads (or sponsored posts) and have more control over my feed. That sounds glorious… but $14/mo is a huge waste of money for the cesspool Facebook has become.

Gird your loins, people running Friendica instances!

He kind of looks like Morty.

He's got Morty's haircut.

Do it. Not only will that move a large segment of the content providers away from the social network, but it will open the market up again to the competition, which includes the Fediverse. By all means shoot yourself in the foot because those "dumb f-cks" no longer trust you because you've burnt that good will.

LET HIM COOK

Would this plan remove all ads? Only then I'd consider it.

Finally, this will surely push me off their platforms and let me tell my family to switch to some private communication.