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 hard to tell, because companies that make their money from ad revenue also spend a lot making their apps more addictive in order to sell you more ads.
You can tell that they are making less than whatever their premium costs though, so for example YouTube makes less than $8/month selling ads.
If people aren’t trying to sell you shit, and don’t have to make their website more addictive it’s relatively cheap to run, for example Wikipedia that has a pretty dynamic read/write load, get 11 billion unique devices a year on just the English site https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/siteviews/?platform=all-sites&source=unique-devices&start=2025-04&end=2026-03&sites=en.wikipedia.org which is about half of the page views: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/01/13/wikipedia-at-25-what-the-data-tells-us/ but spends ~$180m/year across all languages, so it costs about 1c a year/unique device if I’m doing my math right.
Obviously some service like YouTube will cost more because it uses more bandwidth and Gmail will cost more because each user is served individual emails and spam filtering has always been CPU intensive, but the hardware costs are fairly minimal anyway (most of the cost is on staff), so if it wasn’t for the ads Google would have less staff and hosting their services would be much cheaper, maybe not 1c/year but almost certainly less than $1
Obviously Lemmy instances are currently much smaller than reddit, but I’d bet by unique user count Lemmy instances are likely running far more effectively than reddit and likely in the sub dollar category.
On the flip side if you want to make something a subscription only service you need to spend a bunch of money processing payments and subscriptions, probably more than the actual hosting costs.