WhatsApp introduces ads in its app

Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services, i.e. how many people pay for paid personal e-mail services?

I just don't want to believe that our services have to be paid for through proxy by giving huge cut to 3rd parties. The quality goes down both as UX and as core content, our attention span is destroyed, our privacy is violated and our political power is being stolen as content gets curated by those who extract money by giving us the "free" services.

It's simply very inefficient. IMHO we should go back to pay for what you use, this can't go on forever. There must be way to turn everything into a paid service where you get what you paid for and have your lives enhanced instead of monetized by proxy.

I don’t have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a gigantic chunk of the “i would rather pay a small fee to use a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads” crowd is mostly all-talk. And I am saying this as someone who genuinely believes in the “small fee instead of paying with ad exposure” approach.

The one specific example of this that made me think so is the Youtube Premium situation. So many people in the “a fee instead of ads” crowd consumes YT for hours a day, but so far I’ve only met one person (not counting myself) who actually pays for YT Premium.

And yes, a major chunk of the people I talked about this with were FAANG engineers, so it isn’t like they cannot afford it. But it felt like they were more interested in complaining about the ad-funded-services landscape and muse on their stances around it, as opposed to actually putting their money where their mouth is.

All I can say is, I am not paying for YT Premium out of some ideological standpoint or love for Google (not even close). It has genuinely been just worth it for me many times over in the exact practical ways I was expecting it to.

I know lots of people that pay for YT premium. Lots of people pay for Spotify too. I even pay for Kagi.

Spotify I get because the Spotify free experience is HORRID.

Youtube is also moving into that direction.

It's unclear to me how the paid Spotify experience compares with free, but you still get ads with the paid one. Also, you need to curate heavily because Spotify's algorithm will push certain types of content. If you listen to a podcast once, it is hard to get rid of it, as it will keep popping into your feed, or whatever they call their interface.

Omg I literally puke with Shopify ads in podcasts.

Whats the point of paid, premium service like Spotify if I keep being served those stupid, dishonest and bordeline illegally deceiving Shopify ads every 15 minutes.

Because the ad has literally nothing to do with Spotify? Podcasters can say or sell whatever.

Spotify has enough power to say that podcasters should have ad free feed for premium subscribers or get deplatfromed. Obviously I would expect Spotify to pay podcasters.

The idea of paid, premium service with ads is ridiculous.