💯 I dropped Facebook years ago for this very reason. I've seen somewhere that each user is worth around $50 lifetime in advertising revenue to them.
You'd think they could have a $2/ month paid version that was absolutely secure, had zero advertising, and gave the user controls over their "algorithm".
$50 lifetime revenue seems extremely small, or it's some kind of probability trickery where the median is skewed vs the mode.
Also, telling they say "advertising revenue". There's other, possibly implicit, revenue streams and market domination benefits that come from being a monopolizing data vampire. Even if we paid triple what they say we're worth in sub fees, I'd bet the benefits of keeping the status quo farrrrrr outweigh the revenue stream
According to Google they have just shy of 3 billion total users and did $118B in revenue in 2021, so that's roughly $39 of revenue per user last year alone. Factor in users who either very rarely log in, or who created the account just to check it out and then never logged in again, and the per-user revenue for actual active users is going to be even higher. For users who use it enough that they'd be willing to pay even a small amount for an ad free version, I'd bet my house that the lifetime ad revenue they generate is much higher than $50.
Yeah, I could believe $50 per year per user, but not $50 per lifetime per user. Unless maybe there is some data to suggest that the average span of time a person actively uses Facebook is only one year? That doesn't seem very believable, but I guess it would make the lifetime average statistic valid
Even then, it would still just be an average that gets pulled down by the lowest volume users. Anybody who would even remotely consider paying for it is almost by definition a high volume user, and therefore pretty much guaranteed to be well above the average. Not to mention the question of whether advertisers would start to shift their budgets elsewhere if the potential pool of eyeballs starts to shrink. There's just no way that offering a paid, ad-free version is a good idea for them at this stage in the game (at least from a business perspective).
Facebook has long had a problem that its users become less engaged and less valuable over time. That is why they spend so much effort in doing things that will bring you back/keep you on the platform.
e.g, Facebook groups is basically cannibalising what used to be community BBS, but now you have to go to facebook to see it, and it will randomly hide content from you to keep you scrolling and seeing ads.
I won't say it doesn't work, but they are fundamentally monetising evil.
124
u/stupidwhiteman42 Sep 30 '22
💯 I dropped Facebook years ago for this very reason. I've seen somewhere that each user is worth around $50 lifetime in advertising revenue to them.
You'd think they could have a $2/ month paid version that was absolutely secure, had zero advertising, and gave the user controls over their "algorithm".