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X is testing new paid membership tiers to compensate for poor ad revenue
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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I can't see why you'd pay for a service that still had ads? It's why I've never gotten cable - if I'm paying, I don't want ads.
The whole "pay to avoid ads" model is so weird though.
Why? Ads are one method of payment, cash is another. The weird model is paying more to remove ads. There should just be two tiers, free with ads, or paid without ads. If t former doesn't make sense, only offer the latter.
This might be true if the cash payment was equal to the ad revenue per person, but it isn't.
Ad-revenue per person would be a few cents per month, but even if it were $1 per user month, paying $4 or whatever to remove the ads means the ads are punitive. Pay the subscription or we will drive you nuts with shitty ads.
And in that case you probably have an argument against using that service, or perhaps monopolistic practices if they are a natural monopoly. For example, if your energy company charged you $1k to remove ads on your meter, I would completely agree that it's an abuse of their position because it's unrealistic for you to switch to another provider and there's no way the ads are saving you that much off your bill.
My point is that ads should be allowed as a substitute for payment for services. Ad-free tiers should be an approximation of the cost to provide the service to you, with a reasonable amount of profit on top, as should the approximation of ad-revenue. In other words, those two numbers should be largely in-line with each other.
The main issue I have with ad-supported services is that they're frequently a complete violation of privacy. In order to increase the value per impression for ads, they need information about you to serve relevant ads, which means they're likely selling your data to advertisers (or a third party that handles ad personalization). IMO, there should be strict laws around that form of data sharing since that can present a very real security risk to the customer. That's why I'm interested in projects like Brave (just an example, I dislike Brave) that seek to provide ads without the personal data leakage (i.e. Brave could do the personalization inside the browser, and advertisers would only know how many impressions they got and the level of personalized matching for those impressions).
I'm not against the idea of ad-supported tiers, but there should be strict rules surrounding them.
That's fine, your position is reasonable and I can accept that.
Over the years I've become more and more opposed to advertising of any form. It makes me very grumpy - probably unreasonably so.
I understand that services need to make money but $10 / month for something like twitter just seems absurd to me.
Oh absolutely. I think Twitter should be free for personal use and funded by commercial entities that use it since their posts are essentially ads themselves.
Basically, if you want to be authenticed (the blue check mark or similar), you should pay some recurring bill, like a payment per tweet or a monthly bulk cost. And in return, Twitter will periodically verify that you are you and notify you if your account is likely compromised. There can be different tiers for different types of users, from journalists to politicians to influencers.
I don't use Twitter currently, and I certainly won't start when they introduce subscriptions.
I want to see a service with ads that has a subscription and at the end of every month they distribute all ad revenue to the subscribers.
I just don't want a subscription with ads at all.
You look at it backwards. It's 'watch ads to avoid paying'.
Paying is the default way to buy something.
Well, it's the default way of paying for physical objects and professional services.
It hasn't really been the default way of paying for online services.
That's the problem if you want professional online services. Being the product should be the weird option.
I mean, not so much to me. You need to pay for something somehow, either via ads or money.
It’s the pinnacle of modern media. Why w- nevermind.
Hulu has somehow gotten away with it from the start, plenty of people don't seem to mind. In my mind, if the network with greys anatomy has it in their contract that they are exempt from ad-free, what's stopping other companies from leveraging their shows for that sweet ad rev?