Interesting article. I don't blame Facebook for doing whatever they can to properly show ads tho, they provide a "free" service and in exchange serve ads. It's not free to support a company their size and its expected they do everything they can to monetize the site properly.
There's some justice to that argument for access to strictly discretionary sites, but Facebook has been so 'successful' that it's now approaching monopolistic power, & is something close to required infrastructure. There are an increasing number of online contacts which literally offer no alternative. I have a few fake facebook accounts I'll use where I literally have no alternative, none of which have real data associated with them.
I personally have a 100% no-corporate-propaganda rule. No logos on anything where avoidable, no ads allowed on my network, etc. If ads slip through ad blockers & I notice an ad somewhere I place the advertised product or company on a 'never buy' list.
No-one other than Facebook has any benefit to gain by forcing ads on me, and frankly in the very unlikely circumstance that people do manage to damage Facebook by circumventing its propaganda platform, so much the better. I'd very much like to see it driven out of business (wild fantasy, I know).
Can you give some specific examples of places with no contact alternatives? Not really grokking this point. Do you mean they (the business) can't be contacted any other way, and facebook is their only presence?
Not if specific means linking to FB! But, yes, there are many local businesses (notably pubs, cafes & some specialty stores) whose only online presence is there. Also some noncommercial stuff - eg in recent bush fires where I live, a local FB group was sometimes the most up to date, if not always the most accurate, source of information. Bizarrely, some XR events are also only publicised on FB.
Wouldn't work. Spending money on anything puts people on the disposable income demographic which is the exact audience the advertisers want to reach.
It's impossible to reach a workable compromise with the advertising industry. They don't care about our convenience and would place ads under our eyelids if they could get away with it. The truth is we're way past the point of peaceful negotiation with the advertising industry. Better to unconditionally block everything and hope they go bankrupt.
Besides, making users pay money to avoid ads is just insulting. Blockers exist because of the sheer amount of abuse they perpetrate in order to serve their useless noise. People should not have to pay extortion money in order to avoid the abuse. The abuse should simply not happen in the first place.
> Spending money on anything puts people on the disposable income demographic which is the exact audience the advertisers want to reach.
Why do we care what advertisers want? Use regulation to force ad-funded companies to allow people to pay the average revenue per user to opt-out of ads and forbid using the fact they’re paying as a signal to raise prices.
>Why do we care what advertisers want? Use regulation to force ad-funded companies to allow people to...
Why should the government care what users want? How much money are users going to pay for lobbyists to lobby for this regulation you desire? None, of course. But advertisers will happily pay lots of money to lobby congresspeople to keep the laws advertiser-friendly.
There are plenty of abusive ads out there, no doubt. But I wouldn't place Facebook ads in that category. They've actually been extremely restrained compared to a lot of what's out there, including video ads on Instagram.
This is a really good observation. What if we required all ad-based services to make available an equivalent premium offering that showed no ads? I think 99% of people would be stunned at the necessary price and would not pay it anyway, but at least it would be quantified.
This is one of the more important regulations big tech should be subjected to in my opinion.
Let me pay for the services I use, with believable guarantees that my data is not used or sold in any way by the service provider. And regulate the cost to be a reasonable margin over production costs of these services. Hosting my hosting my posts and photos should not be that expensive.
If it can be scraped and stored, FB will do it just because. And then apologize if caught, but keep storing it. Because why not? They figure, if it can be stored, someone is doing it. They can take every advantage they can get for their “friends you may know...” and user retention.
If they’re forced to offer a paid tier without ads for a fixed price then their incentive would be to do so in the most profitable way possible by reducing engineering overheads & the cost of storing that data.
Currently they do it because they assume there’s a correlation between the extents to which they violate your privacy and revenue. If the revenue is locked static then this breaks down and the incentives change.
It's not that difficult if there is a will. Just let big tech know that if they break this law, they are going to be fined all the way to bankrupty without hesitation. Once shareholders have lost their money, government as the biggest debtor will sell the company back to market. Couple of rounds of this and even the more stubborn company starts to think differently.
I've seen lots of people say this but like maybe a fraction of people use GSuite like I do (even my phone number is on my GSuite). Big talk from HN usually. Maybe you'll do it but a fraction of people do.
There are no ads in GSuite mail.
So you take the fraction of people who will do that and see if it's worth building. Answer: it's not worth it for practically anyone. It's like building a Bitcoin integration. Everyone "would buy if it would accept Bitcoin" but come on, no one is actually in that narrow space of utility where the difference in buying is adding Bitcoin or not.
If you guys build software maybe you'll see it yourself. Go ahead and try it. Maybe one in five hundred of you will see positive results.
Can you also use google search without ads & tracking?
I do not claim that it would be good business from big tech. Vice versa. That's why they would need to be regulated to offer that. To me, it would not even matter if it was pretty much nobody using that paid service. Just having the option would be important.
> I've seen lots of people say this but like maybe a fraction of people use GSuite like I do (even my phone number is on my GSuite).
GSuite is, quite famously, not equivalent to Google's consumer offerings except for ads. It's an enterprise targeted service with some extra enterprise features but delayed, if any, access to lots of features that go to the consumer versions.
Plus, the consumer versions of many of the pieces in GSuite also don't have ads.
So, it's really not a good barometer for how many people would swap out an ad-infested service for an otherwise-equivalent paid ad-free service.
> I think 99% of people would be stunned at the necessary price and would not pay it anyway
Please back this up with some actual numbers, because they're not as high as you're making people believe they'd be.
I am happily paying for YouTube Premium just because I don't get interrupted by ads. In India, their premium costs less than $2 per month. That price is very justifiable for me (And their ARPU is ~$9/yr btw, so they are making 2 times as much from me than they were before by showing me ads).
According to this site (https://www.statista.com/statistics/234056/facebooks-average...), Facebook had an ARPU of $25 (average, higher per user in US and EU, lower in APAC) per year in 2018. Which is $2 per month. If they promise no ads (and associated tracking), I will pay three times that amount each month.
I think a lot of us on HN would be willing to pay these prices to support the ad-supported services we use if the option was available (and the pricing was reasonable).
not sure this is true. Twitch has Ad Free Turbo, it's about $15/month. Youtube had Red, similar price. Both have customers. The real issue is that with google or FB I don't know that I'm not still being sold all over the place. I only know with Twitch because I work there. Also Youtube has been ratcheting up the ads like crazy lately, and I'm very sure red isn't worth it for me personally.
Well you know, your data is not directly sold. Your data with Google just as part of targeting campaigns ("User is high spender in Google") or equivalent in DoubleClick and Twitch/Amazon is on its way.
If you prefer, we don't give to someone the info that IP A.B.C.D but we sell the possibility to target IP A.B.C.D with an ad.
It's not "selling" data, but still monetizing it.
Google used to have a service where you set a monthly spend and it would basically bid for ad space, using your money. Instead of displaying the actual ads, it would display an image of your choosing.
It was a pretty great idea and I can't remember what it was called, but it's no longer around as far as I can tell.
Something like that on any ad supported platform would be pretty neat.
Wouldn't work. Users who are willing to pay to make ads go away are the most valuable audience for advertisers because they have money to spend. Therefore FB would have to charge a TON of money to make up for their billions in lost ads revenue, and nobody would pay that amount anyway.
That doesn't really make sense to me. I'm willing and able to pay for an ad-free experience. I will never ever click on an ad. Ever. I adblock like crazy. I don't see how I'm at all valuable to advertisers. And I suspect I'm nowhere near alone when it comes to people who would pay for no ads.
A quick search claims FB's annualized average ad revenue per user for 2018 was just under $25[0]. If I got value out of FB (I used to be a regular user, but now I just have the account for event invitations and otherwise never check it), I would absolutely pay $25/year to be able to use it without ads.
I suspect FB is near the top end for how much ad revenue they're able to extract from people; I imagine most sites are sub-$1 (certainly sub-$5), and could price subscriptions accordingly.
It's not as simple as charging ad revenue per user.
Only a small subset of users can/would afford to pay $25/yr for Facebook, and these users are arguably the most valuable to advertisers. Therefore by letting them skip ads, FB would lose out on more than $25/yr/user.
It might be profitable at something like $1,000/yr, but who would pay that?
So you just repeated the same argument I replied to, without adding anything new. It absolutely does not follow to me that the people who could and would pay for an ad-free experience are the most valuable to advertisers. As I pointed out, I am one of those people, and I expect I am worth nearly nothing to advertisers. Sure, there's certainly a subset of the would/could crowd who click on ads like crazy and buy a bunch of crap, but is that in the majority? I wouldn't think so.
And besides, there's always a number that works out to a break-even point. Maybe it's above $25/yr, but suggesting it's as high as $1000/yr is absurd. Even if it's $100/yr, I'd still bite (not for FB, but for a site I'd actually get use out of to the degree that many people do with FB). Sure, that further reduces the pool of people who could/would pay, but it'd still be an available option for some people.
I am willing to pay, but I very strongly despise ads. I'm not sure I have value for advertisers, as I never click on ads. In fact I'm pretty sure advertisers are wasting money on me, and Facebook is quite happy to continue charging them anyway
Not sure about that. I just think that so few people would be willing to pay for it that it's just not worth the effort. Introducing billing brings administrative costs and requires more support. Sure, the HN crowd would maybe pay for ad free facebook, but ads don't seem to be that unpopular for most people.
It introduces far, far less overhead than advertising does though, so I bet they could handle it. Especially if they did $5/mo and essentially doubled the profits from these people.
Most users who are willing to pay to make ads go away are also people who are willing to make ads go away for free. They install uBlock Origin and get rid of most ads from most sites. Why pay $5 to this site and $12 to that site when you can just get an ad-free experience for free, with no ongoing commitments and no recurring transactions?
I think you are over-generalizing. As an anec-datum, I made this point to someone in 2014 (that FB makes about $25/year/person)and I asked if he would pay $25/year. He said he would pay $25/month. And this is definitely not someone who is going to be bothered to learn anything about installing adblockers. He just happens to be reasonably successful in his non-tech field.
I have issues with Facebook and do everything I can to limit my interaction with the platform, but for some situations it's unavoidable - RSVPs to events where there is no alternative, some things relating to births/deaths or marriages, close family members who I've failed to coax off their messaging platform all come to mind. In those situations I'm not going to compromise my own security or privacy.
You can only rsvp over facebook, not via text, email, phone, in person, etc? I've never found there to be no alternative. Hell for most events unless the outlay to throw it was extensive you can just show up, I've never actually had an issue with this, and if they actually want you to show they'll call YOU.
The network effects of sites like Facebook, YouTube, Google, and Twitter oftentimes mean taking the ethical stance and "not being part of it" can create serious harm to your business/career/vocation.
There's a reason Instagram Influencer and YouTuber are, despite the sniggering of many people, real jobs that earn tons of money for those skilled in plying the craft.
This is especially true in a lot of developing countries, it's so bad Facebook is effectively considered the internet in many parts of the world. Just look at their ridiculously anti-competitive internet.org/free basics service which is quite dangerous due to the extreme network effect it creates by blocking nearly all smaller 3rd party websites for most users on that service(even though there are some search engines available they will be of little use unless a user can access the pages in the search results).
Every tool available should be used to fight Facebook's world takeover plans, including Ad-blocking aggressively. In cases where it's not practical to entirely avoid Facebook the most ethical option is to aggressively block all their monetization paths so as not to further their dangerous expansion ambitions.
I'm currently in the Philippines and a lot of businesses don't have their own web sites and just have Facebook and Instagram pages.
I just browse Facebook without logging in but it has a huge dialog asking me to log in.
Of course there are exceptions to the rule but most people are not IG Influencers and Youtubers so opting out of these social media services are not as painful.
Facebook using my computer to run their code means they should play by my rules. After all, I'm the one paying for the bandwidth, hardware, and any financial or psychological consequences of seeing or interacting with their ads.
Maybe I'd have less of a problem with their ads if they actually took responsibility for what they're pushing and cleaned up any eventual mess (like promoting weight loss scams or outright illegal services).
Users of Facebook are not required to agree with Facebook's business practices, and there is no reason that they should do so. It is perfectly acceptable to use a company's product and criticize how the company operates at the same time.
The first part is always true, but criticism still serves as a disincentive even when the person doesn't stop using the product.
There are plenty of cases where a person believes it's in their best interest to use a product, yet still criticizes it because some aspects of the product are hostile to them. It would be most effective to stop using the product, but sometimes, the criticism alone makes a difference.
I disagree with the parent comment's statement (that a person should agree with the company's practices if the person uses their product). Disagreeing with hostile practices is better than agreeing to them, even if the person continues to use the product.
I don’t blame Facebook for trying insist you see ads. I do blame them for dirty dark patterns like blocking copy and paste in calendar events so that you can’t copy them to an external service.
The web has, since the very beginning I think, had the notion of public and private resources, where access to private resources requires authentication. I view facebook as an almost entirely private resource, protected by a user name, password, and terms of use.
So, they can do what they want within the law, so far as I care. I only get annoyed when people engage in hostile behaviour on the public internet - resources that we're meant to freely read, share links to, or index, or process in whatever way we choose.
As far as I can tell, facebook do quite a good job of keeping their walled garden well controlled and secure. I barely see anything of their website, but others are willing to jump through hoops just to be in there (e.g. sending in copies of passports). You know, these people will put up with quite a lot of abuse.
I think they should provide an option to perhaps pay them directly to opt-out of ads. If you choose not to pay but still use their service for free then they must do what they must to monetize.
You can be in favor of both sides of this argument, I would say I am. I believe in my right to modify what's running on my computer and network, including things like installing adblocker extensions and pi-hole and so on. But I also believe that no organization is obligated to serve their data to me in a way that makes it easy to block those ads.
They are wasting CPU hours and man hours on obfuscation features rather than real value to the end user. But nothing is really wrong with that, it's just a bit silly. If they think it makes them more profit overall than actually enhancing Facebook, they can take that bet. (I think it's the wrong bet, but they can still take it)
That's basically my attitude too, and I'd consider myself one of the more pro-adblocker advocates.
I see the internet as a bunch of servers talking to each other. Some make requests to others, some respond to those requests by sending content.
You can block me, you can choose to not send or respond data to my requests, and you can send your website/content in some form that's better suited to Perl golf or the obfuscated C contest. That's your prerogative.
On my end, I get to decide who I send my requests to, how I spend my time and attention, and what I do on my machine with incoming requests and data.
Make your site bad enough, and I (and others) will stop going, and eventually you'll likely sow the seeds of your own destruction (as people move away and create competition), but fundamentally that's your call to make.
Just like its mine to ignore you or your requests that I talk to your affiliated servers, edit and filter the content once it's on my machine/infrastructure, and not pay attention to the nonsense you send.
Personally I would like an ad blocker that only blocks annoying ads, or ads that contain malware. I would also be willing to pay a monthly subscription for an adblock service, where the subscription gets divvied out to the sites I visit.
In fact, I can think of how this could work on a large scale. A site can sign up to the adblock service to receive a prorated portion of revenues that individual subscribers pay in, and subscribers have a browser button where they can rate the site (thumbs up, neutral, or thumbs down) for usefulness. That rating can then be fed into a trainer for a search engine so that search results are tuned to that user's preferences (along with a user profile that gets automatically built up, or that a user can adjust themselves). For extra bonus points, the user can get a 10% discount on the service for agreeing to allow the adblock service to monetize that data (and agreeing to their data sharing policy) -- otherwise that data is used only to influence search results.
BTW, for years I didn't bother with an ad blocker until I started getting repeatedly hit with malware served up by the ad networks. For that same reason I don't bother with an ad blocker on my phone, because so far I haven't gotten hit with ad-delivered malware on my phone or tablet yet.
Users are allowed to control how they view content on their own computer. Facebook has chosen to give the content out for free and users may choose to render the content however they wish.
And the user is in no way obligated to look at the ads. If I start a business giving away things for free expecting the users to pay me back later but in no way requiring them to and it doesn't work out then thats just a bad business model.
In this case, yes, yes you can. Although note that the value flows in the other direction. We're getting Facebook content (worthless), they're getting our attention (valuable).
What do you guys think?