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.

Taking the YouTube example, and many others like it, I only use it because it is free.

If YouTube was subscription only, hypothetically, I would just not use it, and my life would be same as it is now.

There are a great many services that are nice to have, but very few I would bother paying for out of my wallet. Given the choice of paying for them or not using them, I would just walk away from most of them.

This would be fine if you also don't use Adblock. You can't say I use the bakery for free as long as I have the backdoor access key and therefore "free".

Let's imagine if there was a free bakery though. But being free they were always struggling and sometimes the bread was a bit late. Then BigBakeryCo moves into town and also provides free bread as long as you also take one of their magazines and promise to read it. Not most people will go to BigBakeryCo because their funds from selling magazine space means they can provide a more professional service. Now there is almost no one going to the original free bakery so the owner decides to close shop. Suddenly your only option for free bread is BigBakeryCo. Now BigBakeryCo complains that people are throwing their magazines into the trash without reading them and people like you call out those people for taking advantage of poor BigBakeryCo.

The truth is that Youtube is a parasite. They don't create free content, they have inserted themselves between regular people creating free videos and you and are demanding that you pay them for access to what would have existed without them.