I know a lot of us use ad-blockers and the like so we don’t see ads often anymore. But we can get some insight as to how much certain “services” make by showing ads to the average customer when they have paid ad-free subscriptions available. YouTube, for example. Maybe streaming services.
I’m curious how much most things would cost in this case, especially since so many “services” tend to have maintenance and upkeep costs.
How much would Facebook cost to use if it were ad-free? Snapchat? Windows? (Which is extra gross for having all of an up-front cost, ads embedded, AI included, and pushes for paid subscriptions of its own complementary products…)
It’s a question that doesn’t have a simple answer (even with publicly available data), but for the individual, it wouldn’t be much if the service was decentralized and the burden of hosting is placed on the user or a small community (think about how most game servers work that can host tens or hundreds of players by community members out of a surplus PC or cheap VPS, or something like a forum for a small website), but the issue is once we factor in scale to the equation.
If Youtube became a paid subscription, a majority of the userbase would cease using the platform overnight (and single-pay is outright unsustainable due to the costs of being a hosting platform for video content), and it’s more than likely that users would turn to piracy or sharing accounts rather than paying the fee directly.
Windows does have a one time license fee, but their issue is less about monetization and more about monopolistic enshittification. The only cure for that is owning what you buy and not having centralized control, which is only seen in open source/free software platforms such as Linux Distros.
Facebook has the same issue as Youtube to a degree, and largely is sustainable purely due to the network effect brought by the low entry cost of $0 to the user (despite being able to make plenty of money off them through telemetry and ads). A price tag of any sort would break their model as well, along with any other social media platform such as Snapchat.
tl;dr: the only reason the current incumbent platforms are profiting to begin with is because they have a “free but at a hidden cost” as their entire business model, so any price above $0 erases their userbase and relevance, along with being unsustainable for their current infrastructure.