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’d love to know the expected ad revenue per user for makers of apps like WhatsApp, Instagram.

I’m pretty convinced I’d pay 10x or more than that amount for a completely ad free version but I can’t be sure.

Don’t underestimate how expensive ads are and thus how much money they can bring in. Marco Arment, the developer of Overcast podcast player, has made remarks in the past about how the ad-supported version is completely viable and may actually make him more money per user than the price of his paid option. In his case, he runs his own contextual ad system. Obviously Meta is in a completely different league in terms of sophistication, meaning they are probably able to sell more targeted ads which means more money, and they also have the luxury of not having to pay any middlemen since they own their own ad infrastructure as well.

Part of me thinks the reason why they don’t offer that paid ad-free version of Facebook (which they built to try and appease the EU regulators) in the US is because their ARPU is so high that people would laugh at the price “Facebook/IG Premium” would have to cost.

Also, don’t forget that at least for now, paid subscriptions to social media apps would need to pay a 30% rent to the platform owner duopoly. This means that the price it would be it would cost would need to be 42% above than its ad ARPU just to break even.

> Part of me thinks the reason why they don’t offer that paid ad-free version of Facebook (which they built to try and appease the EU regulators) in the US is because their ARPU is so high that people would laugh at the price “Facebook/IG Premium” would have to cost.

The ad-free one doesn’t have to cost more than the ad-supported ARPU. There’s a pretty reasonable argument to be made that social media services with near-ubiquitous uptake should be regulated as utilities, and regulators could reasonably place the price at cost + a marginal profit margin as determined to be reasonable, like they do for other utilities that are privately-owned.

> Also, don’t forget that at least for now, paid subscriptions to social media apps would need to pay a 30% rent to the platform owner duopoly.

They don’t have to offer paid subscriptions via IAP.

> doesn’t have to cost more than the ad-supported ARPU

I'll state up front that I'm not much of a socialist, so I realize opinions will vary, but it seems crazy to regulate something so frivolous as a social media site to the point of setting its prices. If people don't like Facebook, their ads, or their pricing, simply not using it is not a life-crippling suggestion the way "don't use the Internet" is.

So I'd support you on regulating broadband ISPs waaaaay before setting the prices X or FB can charge for meme-related services.

I'm not much of a socialist either, and I wish that social media was frivolous enough that I didn't see their regulation as a reasonable proposition.

The problem isn't access to memes, it's that for various categories of services/interactions, Meta (and presumably WeChat and/or others in other locales) properties effectively are the internet. I've seen all of the following use social media services as their sole method of communication or online presence: amateur sports teams/leagues, gyms, local governments, government agencies, parent/school groups, local service providers (barbers, farmers' markets, restaurants, etc.), online classifieds, community food boxes.

The fact that Meta has intermingled its meme factory with its hosting of the informational/communication platforms for a wide array of local groups/organizations/businesses is something they chose to do, and I'm not willing to accept the excuse of "we make a lot of money from our ad-serving brainrot algorithms so we couldn't possibly charge less than that amount of money for access to the non-algorithmic features on which we've gotten people hooked."

> [...] hosting of the informational/communication platforms for a wide array of local groups/organizations/businesses is something they chose to do,

I would argue that it's those people (citizens/companies/orgs) who did the important choosing here, not Meta. It's more cheap and accessible than ever to make a website that isn't dependent on social media, and there are tons of alternatives for connecting groups.

The elephant in the room, I think, is that most people actually feel that Whatsapp, Facebook Groups, etc. have no important downsides. I can't prove it, but I suspect that more than half the people who are involved in such network-effect communication (let's say, all the categories you described, the non-1:1 communication that takes place hosted on Meta platforms) find it to be very convenient, not least because they're already on those platforms by choice for recreation.

THAT is why it's so hard for the minority who philosophically hate ideas like targeted ads are unable to convince the masses to all move to Mastodon, or to one of the hundreds of lesser-known platforms that don't have all the same baggage (in their eyes). It isn't for lack of options. It's because at least a plurality of people are fine with it.

So the argument to effectively nationalize Meta, simply as punishment for getting normies to like their apps so much, because a minority of people just think it's wrong to be good at targeting ads, seems extreme to me.

> So the argument to effectively nationalize Meta, simply as punishment for getting normies to like their apps so much, because a minority of people just think it's wrong to be good at targeting ads, seems extreme to me.

I don’t find this to be a good representation of my argument - what I’d call for is very much not punishment, it’s a targeted response to fix no more than the identified problem. (The problem being, people aren’t being afforded a reasonable option to function in society that doesn’t involve a large wealth transfer to facebook.)

I don’t think “effectively nationalize Meta” is a fair reading of my position either - there are plenty of autonomous private companies are non-nationalized and that operate in areas where there’s regulation around pricing.