I remember when Whatsapp became a paid app, I can’t remember the details as I believe they varied by platform (iOS vs Android) but it was either €0.79 or €0.99, I’m not sure if one off or yearly payment, but it doesn’t matter.

I, as the “computer guy”, had friends and family asking how to pirate it. This is coming from SMS costing €0.25 per message (text only!) and also coming from people who would gladly pay €3 for a Coke at a bar that they’d piss down the toilet an hour later. It didn’t matter if it only took 3 or 4 messages to make Whatsapp pay off for itself, as they were sending dozens if not hundreds of messages per day, either images, videos and whatnot (MMSs were much more expensive).

At that moment I realised many (most?) people would never pay for software. Either because it’s not something physical or because they’re stuck in the pre-Internet (or maybe music) mentality where copying something is not “stealing” as it’s digital data (but they don’t realise running Whatsapp servers, bandwidth etc cost very real money). And I guess this is why some of the biggest digital services are ad-funded.

In contrast, literally never someone has voiced privacy concerns, they simply find ads annoying and they’ve asked for a way to get rid of them (without paying, of course).

I should say, I’m from one of the European countries with the highest levels of piracy.

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 can say from experience and from others who have been in this position (not email, but general services); its around 1-2% of people.

Nebula, the answer to the tyranny of Youtube (who works for advertisers), has a <1% conversion rate despite tons of huge Youtubers pushing it. Vid.me, the previous answer to youtubes tyranny, went bankrupt because people hate ads and also hate subscriptions, nor do they donate.

I could write pages about this, but I wish I could violently shake all the children (many who are now in their 40's) that so deeply feel entitled to free content on the internet, and scream "If you are not paying directly for the product, you have no right to complain about the product".

In reality the ad model is not going anywhere. Given the choice, people overwhelmingly chose to let the advertisers steer the ship if it means "free" entry.

I remember WhatsApp costing money, 1$ per year or per lifetime or something. I paid for it, I think it was a WinRar situation though, where deleting and reinstalling the app gave it to you for free or something.

I'm guessing most people didn't pay though, since they scraped the fee (even before FB bought them). I guess it was just too little money to be worth the effort.

"There must be a 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."

Internet is a paid service.

When I first accessed the internet in the 1980s, the only paid "service" necessary to use it was internet service. There was not the plethora of VC-funded third parties trying to act as intermediaries. The term "internet" amongst younger generations usually means only www sites, maybe app "endpoints" and _nothing else_. This is such a waste of potential.

Today's internet is more useful than the 1980s internet. But I do not attribute that to third party intermediaries that only seek to profit from other peoples' use of it. I attribute the increased utility to technological improvements in hardware, including networking equipment. I do not attribute the increased utility to "improvements" in software, and certainly not the proliferation of software distributed for free as a Trojan Horse for those seeking to profit from data collection, surveillance and advertising services.

The idea of paying for what these intermediaries try to call "services" makes no sense to me. Certainly, paying these intermediaries will not prevent them from data collection and surveillance for commercial purposes. (There are already examples.) It only subsidises this activity. Perhaps people believe these intermediaries engage in data collection, surveillance and ad services because "no one will pay for their software" instead of considering that they do so because they can, because there are few laws to prevent them. It was unregulated activity and is stilll grossly underregulated activity. It is more profitable than software licensing.

> Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services

Rounded to the nearest meaningful number - 0%

I pay a third party to host my email, and wouldn’t mind paying an honest service provider to host something like an XMPP service.

I wouldn’t pay Meta or similar companies for messaging services. And especially not for siloed messaging networks.

The problem with this is that once enough people are paying for an ad-free subscription, services reintroduce ads to the paid subscription, sometimes alongside the introduction of a new more expensive ad-free subscriotion.

I have a pet theory that the world would be slightly better place if the United States Postal Service had launched a convenient and free (taxpayer-funded) email service before Google:

1. I think folks would be naturally more skeptical of the government than they are of big tech, ideally leading to E2EE for email that's usable by the masses.

2. Phishing and scams could have a dedicated law enforcement arm (Postal Inspectors).

3. We'd reduce the amount of email-based personal data being mined and turned into entirely unregulated ad-tech nightmares.

Me? Never again.

I used to... like some app, paid for a "PRO" version to get additonal features. Everything was ok.

Then 6 months went by, and they added a cloud feature, to upload some stuff and configs and sync between devices, and it turned from one time payment to a subscription plan. Then built-in features got moved into the cloud, and previously working stuff didn't work without subscriptions anymore. Then they added ads. PRO has maybe 2 more features than a free version and no nag screen at the start, and that's it.

> 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.

Can this corporate propaganda stop? Premises:

1. That we (the corporation) offer a free service is because people don’t wanna pay

2. Those freeloaders are costing us money

3. Eventually we have to introduce ads, shrugs we hate to do it but the freeloaders force our hands

Instead:

1. The strategy IS to be free to use

2. INVEST money in building the network effect

3. When a critical mass has been reached: MONETIZE

Where is the user’s preference in this? Nowhere. Why assume anything else? Why?

It is patently irrational for all parties to spend money (“pay for what you use”) on a buergoning social media platform:

- Business: why add any friction at all to a social media platform that you are supposed to grow?

- ... and why concede any talking points to the naive people who think that paid service equals no ads or monetized “attention” if you do both?

- Just monetize people instead

- User: why would anyone on God’s Green Earth pay to use a social media platform that was pay-to-use on day zero when there are no users?

People pay for their mobile phone service and internet service. Growing up one of my first emails was bundled with our dial-up ISP.

Just because you're paying for a service doesn't mean your data won't get sold and monetized, nor does it protect you from ads getting shoved down your throat. ISPs and mobile phone service providers both sell your data. It's a common practice for services to keep raising prices and introduce ad-supported tiers in order to squeeze pay-piggies as much as possible.

Any time someone has tried starting a service that competed with big tech it either gets bought out or ripped off. And big tech's infinitely deep pockets means they can run at a loss for years until all the competition has disappeared.

I think in order to truly solve these problems it will require legislation and breaking up big tech into smaller companies. We also need legislation to require tech companies to stop creating walled gardens that cannot integrate with other platforms.

I remember reading that one reason you often can't escape ads by paying for the service is that through the act of choosing to pay for the service, you are self-identifying as someone willing to pay for things, and are thereby ironically putting yourself into the most valuable ad-targeting demographic there is.

It is my view that you will never escape ads by paying for any content/service that is suitable for displaying ads. Reason: by the very act of paying for the service, you signal to advertisers that you are a person with purchasing power -- the very type of person they want to target. So the more you pay to keep ads away, the more advertisers will pay to put them back in. And if your service provider is under pressure to increase profits, and they're finding it hard to increase market share or innovate, they will reach for one of two solutions: (1) let service quality decline through cost cutting, and then introduce higher priced service tiers, or (2) ads. This is unfortunately what we see in reality.

It's extremely hard to compete in a commodity market where a large corp can do a free product to drive competition away.

Gmail's promise of 1GB free storage was an incredible offer at those times, where many people used "paid" mailers. Paid as part of the Internet subscription with a worse Webmailer and less storage than Google provided.

It is especially complicated with Mail, where Anti-Spam measures make operating an own server work (on one side for filtering incoming mail, on the other side to prevent being blocked for spamming)

Telegram has 15 million premium users paying ~$50/year

They also issue bonds which is another fun way to collect money.

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.

Most people go absolutely mentally deranged by a simple magical incantation. The powerful incantation or spell consists of only one word: "Free". That word will make people loose their mind and their soul.

It will make people accept anything and everything that they would never otherwise accept. They will line up for hours, they will accept hostile and toxic messages being screamed into their faces, they will humiliate themselves, they will spend sleepless nights, they will willingly enslave themselves, they will wither away in sickness, they will murder millions in the most cruel way imaginable.

All for "free".

Societies in our history were not arranged in the same way around money, because probably there was some knowledge of the two-sided curse of avarice and stinginess. I'm talking about medieval and post-medieval society, where most people didn't use or have money in their everyday life. Instead they had duties.

At this point, you could have governments finance this piece of infrastructure.

This would cost $350M/year to Europe [1] -- which is a drop of the ocean in their budget -- in exchange for control of information.

Sounds like a no-brainer to me.

[1] assuming the initial business model of whatsapp was cash neutral, which I think it was

I think the problem is that we all pay for ads whether we're exposed to them or not. Ads result in higher prices, and a higher barrier to entry for competition. It's a collective action problem.

> 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?

Probably not many. OTOH, I pay for Fastmail and NextDNS (both for at least 5 years at this point).

People give strange looks when I mention paying for e-mail, even people "in the know."

SAAS offerings for individuals don't have a lot of market share (streaming services aside). The exception might be iCloud/GMail harassing people about running out of storage, and people just eventually going "sure, here's 3 bucks a month."

I think solution is neither. Such apps are now as much as essential as schools, hospitals and public infrastructure. Hence governments should build them with tax money.

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

Why are you using that as an example, and not asking how many people pay for their cellular data plan?

I think every business model on the planet is subject to “and ads” consideration. I wish it wasn’t true, but it’s the business equivalent of “every app becomes a social graph”.

> IMHO we should go back to pay for what you use

Do you use any free (as in no money comes out of your wallet) services today? If so, which ones?

In defense of ads: Ads do solve the pay-per-use problem, where most apps are subscription based so I'm constantly leaking subscription fees for apps / services I no longer use. Ads are great in that if I stop using a service, I stop paying the attention cost.

Ads also solve the price stratification problem: wealthy users pay with their valuable time, and poor users pay with their less valuable time.

Y'know what, I'd have no problem paying for my "core services" if it were that easy. What I have a problem with is paying for potentially so many services:

* phone

* email

* whatsapp, because others use it

* signal, because it's actually good

* telegram, because that one group is on it

* my todo list app

* duolingo

* a good mapping app without ads

... and so on. And the same for my kids. And before you blink, you suddenly pay several hundred dollars per month.

Aka the slippery slope.

One of the problems seems to be that everything comes with transaction costs, so for example Signal cannot easily charge me a single dollar per month, which I suspect is a price point that would work for both me and them (if every one of their users paid it).

>> Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services

Some of us actually paid for WhatsApp! I think it was about $1 a year when it launched. At the time it was providing significant value, especially in areas where cross-border communication was common.

I'm sure $1 isn't enough to cover costs anymore but someone could make a nice living charging $5-10 a month for something similar. The problem is people will always sell out to investors and fuck over their users. It's inevitable.

This is only true if they introduce them. i.e. FB doesn't have a paid service, but obviously Youtube does.

The problem is Whatsapp is a closed ecosystem so unlike email we can't just buy a provider.

And I do pay for youtube. The experience is well worth it and I'm thankful I can afford it (it's not a lot but many can't).

The trouble with charging people is you have to charge everybody the same[1], so you're leaving money on the table with wealthy users, and pricing out poorer users

Ads mean each user 'pays' you according to their spending power

Kinda socialist when you think about it! From each according from his ability...

[1] Obviously companies try to get around this with price discrimination, but it's hard especially for a network effect platform

I would be fine with the consumption model as long as it’s reasonable, but I honestly believe that streaming services hate this idea because it’s not as profitable as the ad model. In fact I am becoming more and more frustrated with services that I am paying for which show me ads even for “ad-free” experiences. For example, I pay for the highest tier of ad-free Hulu and Disney+ but Hulu somehow carves out exceptions for so-called non-Hulu content. So during some of those shows, you will see very frequent, very repetitive ads and it is quite obnoxious. There is literally not even an option to pay for a higher level of ad-free experience (I would!) because I guess they REALLY want to sell me Wegovy and SNHU and whatever other nonsense. The interruptions have gotten so obnoxious that I have lost interest. The only other option is to simply buy the episodes I am interested in. Or stop watching streaming content altogether.

problem is google and meta prefer you not to buy

Ads money is larger than user buying subscription they don't want you to buy software lol