Super interesting. I wonder what would happen if Facebook would implement a subscription service that shows no ads and lets you own and control your data. It's not a bad idea- I'll see if a friend at Fb will ask Zuckerberg if they've ever considered this.
no need to -- I will answer you. Its not feasible in FB current situation. IF they make $100 per year per user already on showing ads/tracking/selling/analyzing/whatever they do to make a buck, then going down to $5/month/user and shifting from paying advertiser to paying user would make it a ghost town. Bottom line: I think most people enjoy what they get out of FB even if they data is being used/sold and they are, up to some point, aware of it.
1) They don't make $100/user/year, not even close. They have 800M users and made 4.27B$ last year. That's $5.33 per user per year.
Even considering their number of active users is bunk, there's no way they've reach anything close to $100/user/year - that would mean they only had 42M users.
2) I don't think the suggestion was for them to shift to another revenue model, I think it was to give the option of subscribing. Much like many other sites e.g. Slashdot, Reddit, etc. Most people would probably still choose the free option.
1) you're missing a few figures and the whole picture, by the conservative estimation Zuckerberg will make 16 billions with the ipo so he personally made ~20 bucks per registered user. Selling ads is pocket money, at the end of the day the wealth is in the mega database of the user data.
See, paying users can choose to take their dollars elsewhere so you have to give them what they want, if it's gratis people flock on the service and lack the incentive to go away if the service is somewhat unsatisfying so you can impose whatever you want to them.
2) they can't offer such an option, facebook is a machine designed to collect, store, hold and aggregate user data and they built a business model out of it. Putting the user in control of its data is the opposite of what facebook wants.
You can't really compare the subscription of news aggregator websites and an hypothetical subscription on facebook. Facebook is unique in the fact that it holds user personal data and has a strong grasp on it through heavy vendor lock-in, you can easily leave slashdot or reddit and get your news elsewhere from an alternative but you can't leave facebook easily because they have your data, data you need in your daily use and there's nowhere to go to to find an equivalent.
I see some things that I'd consider subscribing to, but they only have "real world" subscriptions for hardcopy.
I guess I could send that to a school or hospital or some such. But it'd be neat if they realised that some people are happy to pay for good reporting.
Maybe there's a need for some simple online-only sub, with feedback buttons of "good quality" or "poor quality" on each article.
