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Meta Plans To Charge $14 a Month for Ad-Free Instagram or Facebook (wsj.com) 119

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Would people pay nearly $14 a month to use Instagram on their phones without ads? How about nearly $17 a month for Instagram plus Facebook -- but on desktop? That is what Meta wants to charge Europeans for monthly subscriptions if they don't agree to let the company use their digital activity to target ads, according to a proposal the social-media giant has made in recent weeks to regulators. The proposal is a gambit by Meta to navigate European Union rules that threaten to restrict its ability to show users personalized ads without first seeking user consent -- jeopardizing its main source of revenue.

Meta officials detailed the plan in meetings in September with its privacy regulators in Ireland and digital-competition regulators in Brussels. The plan has been shared with other EU privacy regulators for their input, too. Meta has told regulators it hopes to roll out the plan -- which it calls SNA, or subscription no ads -- in coming months for European users. It would give users the choice between continuing to access Instagram and Facebook free with personalized ads, or paying for versions of the services without any ads, people familiar with the proposal said.
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Meta Plans To Charge $14 a Month for Ad-Free Instagram or Facebook More

Meta Plans To Charge $14 a Month for Ad-Free Instagram or Facebook

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  • Good luck (Score:5, Informative)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Tuesday October 03, 2023 @12:06PM (#63896887)

    Adblockers are free.

    • .... and so is GreaseMonkey

      I see zero ads on my Instagram Feed.

      Coded myself.

      Anyone that knows Vanilla JS can do this pretty easily

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by torkus ( 1133985 )

      Adblockers are free but...half the "content" is still ads in one form or another and that's the problem.

      TBH if I could get a feed of my actual friends and their posts (not xyz interacted with this company that's paying for visibility) then ... it might actually be worth it.

      Well, no not anymore...but before social media made itself into a mindless scrolling machine it could have been.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      That doesn't work well in apps like in iOS. :( Web browsers, like Safari, sure.

      • Sorry, I can't really feel any sympathy here. If people decide to forgo freedom for a bit of convenience, they get what they get.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by erice ( 13380 )

      Adblockers only do so much. My FB feed is swamped with worthless sponsored posts. Adblock does nothing to clean out that manure.

    • Adblockers are free.

      They do not work well on Facebook or Instagram. Facebook's ads are disguised as content by pushing sponsored posts to your feed. No seriously I just logged into Facebook and found 2 of the first 10 things in my feed were actual updates from people on my friends list.

      • Then we need a new type of adblocker that can filter out this nonsense. I'd suggest something that reads your friendlist and blocks everything not posted by your friends.

  • Now we'll see how much people really value FB (Score:3)

    by aldousd666 ( 640240 ) on Tuesday October 03, 2023 @12:07PM (#63896891) Journal
    I have a sneaking suspicion that it's not all that much, compared to the expectations of Meta. Most people have stuck around because of inertia, and this may be the force needed to dislodge them. That being said, if ad-supported version stays the way it is now, many people might just stick with that. I cant' imagine that Ads are SO invasive to people that they fancy paying to get rid of them. At the moment, we can just scroll past them. Full page, interruptive, video, or overlay ads will be a different story.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GrahamJ ( 241784 )

      At the moment. But just like YT they’ll start cranking up the ads to make the non-paid tier less and less bearable to “encourage” you to the paid tier. The enshittification continues.

    • I have a sneaking suspicion that it's not all that much, compared to the expectations of Meta.

      Try again. People are using software [bbc.com] to block all social media on their phones because they don't have the willpower to simply not look.

      I can guarantee FB won't lose many people over this.

    • I cant' imagine that Ads are SO invasive to people that they fancy paying to get rid of them. At the moment, we can just scroll past them. Full page, interruptive, video, or overlay ads will be a different story.

      They're generally not, and at least in the case of Instagram, social media marketers do seem to at least make the effort to make ads fit in with the rest of the content that's added. What might be a bit trickier, however, is how 'influencer' content is handled - many IG content creators make videos with sponsored products; it's still an "ad", but not one from IG...that might be messy because some people would expect "ad-free IG" to mean that there won't be sponsored content either, but since IG doesn't make

      • I use FB Purity on my desktop and never see one ad. I access Facebook on my phone to upload photos out in the field. When I'm bored waiting at the doctor's waiting room, I fuck with every app I have, including Facebook.

        It's nearly impossible to visually separate ads from content.

    • If they did full screen ads, they'd be dead in a month. I don't think facebook or any social media can survive in their current state on ~5% of subscribers paying for it and I feel like I'm being very generous suggesting that as much as 5% would pay any substantial amount.

      This is the problem with social media, it relies on being 'free' and collecting user data. What exactly is the model if they dont have this? It's essentially true for all social media and they'll all get hit with the same rules. gen

    • it's part of the enshittification. Charge for ads, then make the ads worse to encourage subs. They only make pennies off the user per month, vs dollars for a sub.

    • We'll rather see how many people use Facebook that don't know how to install adblockers AND are fed up enough with ads that they don't want to see them.

      I have a hunch that that intersect will be fairly small. Ads on the internet have been a nuisance way, way too long that every Joe Randomsurfer that even remotely gives a fuck has BEGGED his nerd friend by now to do something against those pesky pop-ups, pop-unders and pop-my-ulcers.

      Anyone who still sees ads at all simply doesn't give a fuck about them.

  • Kinda glad to see this (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jacks smirking reven ( 909048 ) on Tuesday October 03, 2023 @12:07PM (#63896897)

    At least it put's a market price on what you as a block of advertising data are actually worth.

    Personally I think it should be required for any company like this to offer some type of paid tier where I am opted out of all tracking and advertising. Of course most people will choose the free option as I imagine most will here but having the option is good so long as those terms are enforced (you can't charge someone and then also track them and advertise)

    • The big problem is that people who are willing to pay money to make ads go away are exactly the people ad companies want to reach.

      So the charge to go ad-free has to cover their own ad revenue plus that of several other people too poor/miserly to be worth advertising to.

      • If that is in fact the case it firstly sounds like a problem for the advertisers, not the consumers and that maybe their ad-economy has something fundamentally broken that finally needs to be reckoned with.

  • Seems Fair (Score:5, Interesting)

    by UMichEE ( 9815976 ) on Tuesday October 03, 2023 @12:11PM (#63896915)

    Instragram has ~2B users. Facebook/Meta makes ~$120B of revenue each year, of which about $50B comes from Instagram. That's about $25/year/user. If you assume that people who'd pay for an ad-free version are heavy users, representing 10X the usage of the average user, then the price Meta is charging is about what they'd make by serving ads. It seems like a ridiculous price to me, but I guess it's kind of fair when you do the math.

    • A lot of those users are in poorer countries where the ad revenue per person is lower, where they'll probably change less to remove ads.

    • The irony is they cut back brutally on spending everywhere (microkitchens, eateries, wellness cash, layoffs) except servers and useless non-engineer employees who sit around and socialize all day. On servers, they're spending $11B a year (for this year and next) without a specific, well-defined need to support a particular product. ~30% ($3B/year) is going to NVIDIA for GPU modules for unspecified (but still vaporware) AI uses.

    • I suspect this also prices in the drop in how valuable the remaining customers are, plus a healthy profit because frankly they'd RATHER take money from ad companies.

      If you pay for an ad-free experience, you're someone that values time and experience over money, which probably means you have lots of money to spare. Who do advertisers like advertising to? People who are willing to pay for things that make their lives marginally more comfortable. The best people are removed from the pool of people you get your

  • Firewalled (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GrahamJ ( 241784 ) on Tuesday October 03, 2023 @12:12PM (#63896921)

    fuckerbook properties are blocked at my firewall.

    • Why? A more effective approach that transcends any devices that don't use your firewall is to not sign up.

      • No, it's not. Facebook creates internal accounts for tracking people who aren't even registered.

      • Not signing up doesn't prevent Meta's trackers from building a shadow profile on you [wikipedia.org]. Blocking Meta's servers at DNS (such as a hosts file or a Pi-hole resolver) is somewhat more effective at that.

        • Since it's near impossible to not provide any data, I took a step further and started poisoning the data well [technologyreview.com]. While the term only gained popularity for trying to feed AI algos misleading data, it's just as useful when trying to create a bogus profile about yourself that doesn't represent you and gives data miners all sorts of misleading information.

          • Since it's near impossible to not provide any data, I took a step further and started poisoning the data well [technologyreview.com]. While the term only gained popularity for trying to feed AI algos misleading data, it's just as useful when trying to create a bogus profile about yourself that doesn't represent you and gives data miners all sorts of misleading information.

            Nice. More people should do this. It was explained to me like this a few years ago: "the only thing better than not being on a database, is to fill the database with so much shit that it becomes useless."

            There used to be a Firefox plugin years ago that would chug away in the background, clicking on random links and ads, the idea being that anyone looking in your web history would have no idea what you were really doing. I wish I could remember the name.... and find a modern equivalent.

            • Replying to myself here, one option is AdNauseam... though I haven't tried it myself yet: https://www.technologyreview.c... [technologyreview.com]

              Thanks Opprtunist for pointing me in the right direction!

              • You're welcome.

                The idea comes from my degree in statistics. One thing our statistics prof always kept repeating is that having no data is something you can easily remedy, but having bogus data means that you have no data.

                The worst you could end up with is bogus data that you don't know is useless. Especially when mixed with useful data. Because then your whole dataset becomes corrupted and essentially worthless for any kind of assessment, since the "poisoned" data will sully the good one.

                In other words, it

  • value proposition (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CAIMLAS ( 41445 ) on Tuesday October 03, 2023 @12:18PM (#63896947)

    Nice try - I'd pay $200/year for an adblocker before I paid one cent to Facebook and have them still siphon my personal data.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by xwin ( 848234 )
      I suspect that lots of people may pay even if they Meta makes FB/Instagram non-free. Have you noticed how most people are glued to their phones? Lots of them are on FB/Instagram/TikTok. When you look how much time people spend on Meta's properties, the value proposition is better than Netflix. Both of these are entertainment one can live without, but a lot of people choose not to.
      Adblockers existed for over 20 years, but somehow people don't use them. Even at my workplace full of people who should be techn

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

        Most people don't think of social media as "entertainment", they think of it as a social application.

        I don't think people would pay for it directly, I think they'd be more likely to look for alternatives. Twitter has a much more dedicated userbase, and their subscription model actually ads value. Short of taking away features for most people, I'm not sure what a subscription model would give Facebook.

        Personally, given how dead craigslist has been since Facebook created their marketplace, I'm not sure if I'd

        • Most people don't think of social media as "entertainment", they think of it as a social application.

          Most people think of it as something they do to kill some time waiting for a bus or appointment. If they couldn't get it for free, they'd do something else.

  • 31 bucks... (Score:3)

    by sajavete ( 5054387 ) on Tuesday October 03, 2023 @12:19PM (#63896949)
    ... for outrage-free variant.

    • I'll buy that for a dollar.

      Anywhere without the agro weirdo losers of Reddit, the insta-cancelers of HN proudly bragging they flagged you for them disagreeing with you, the lied about their age trolls of IG, or the passionate flamewarriors we missed from IRC decades ago.

      If a place or platform provides value, then it's worth associating with. But otherwise, I don't need to pay attention to randos shouting their frustrations into the void. That's what /. is for. ;)

  • Facebook will take your money AND continue to invade your privacy and sell your data.

    You know they will. They have never done anything to deserve a iota of trust with respect to privacy.

  • Ads are one issue... but the manipulation in the algorithm is a huge problem as well. Not that it impacts me anymore, although people wonder why I stare at dogs hoping for them to do something cute or funny IRL.

  • Well the ads are one thing, but the deep data mining is probably the biggest issue, since this is unlikely to go away once the ads disappear. This will still likely influence off site ads tied to Facebook trackers.

    Maybe Iâ(TM)m wrong, but Iâ(TM)m approaching this with scepticism. Only time will tell.

  • If they think losing the ads is that big of a hit to their pocketbook? Perhaps they are approaching this all wrong. For those willing to see ads? Pay them at least 75% of what they think they need to charge for no-ads access. Set up tiers. Tier1 - ads, payment to user. Tier2 - fewer/non-targeted ads, free. Tier3 - User pays (something less than $14 a month), no ads.

    I know, pipe dreams and silliness.

    The other way this goes? If they manage to get any sort of uptick from charging? And people continue to pay t

  • U$D 14 seems a tad expensive (Score:5, Informative)

    by williamyf ( 227051 ) on Tuesday October 03, 2023 @12:49PM (#63897059)

    Yes, they are not sending me ads, but they are still harvesting my data and selling it.

    Besides, most of the slashdot crowd can get a "close to ad free" experience on Facebook using Firefox* + Ublock Origin, Privacy badger and FB containers, among others.

    So, no need to fork cash

    * Adfree FB and IG experiences on Chromium and Webkit are possible but more difficult and, upon introduction of Manifest V3, inferior

  • First of all, even if they block the ads how will you know if they are still sending your data to 3rd parties? Short answer...you don't because Facebook is not open source code so you are left to trust Zuckerberg. Good luck with that.

    Secondly, what happens to all the data on you that they have already collected? It's already in the hands of the advertisers so it can't very well be purged. The toothpaste does not go back into the tube.

    Also, what about product placement ads inside the Instagram posts? This is

    • > First of all, even if they block the ads how will you know if they are still sending your data to 3rd parties?

      I don't think they're even pretending to not do that. They just aren't targeting you with ads based on the information they are collecting anyway.

  • So many people want to stop using both services. They can be hard to leave for some, so annoying that fuck out of them with more ads should do that job very nicely, thank you.

  • Let's think about this for a moment. Facebook's entire business model is based on selling advertising space. Now they want to be able to make money to block advertising. Who is this policy NOT going to piss off?

  • ... I got TOTAL control over ads, recommendations and what was shown to me
    A microscopically tiny quantity of ads are useful to me
    An even tinier quantity of recommendations are useful
    FB is rapidly becoming useless to me. The robot keeps feeding me sports and pop culture. I have ZERO interest in sports or pop culture
    IG has always been useless because it's hostile to desktop computer users

    • The robot keeps feeding me sports and pop culture. I have ZERO interest in sports or pop culture

      And this is the big lie. You can bet that facebook has charged their their clients for "targeted" ads. Those sports advertisers would have been assured by facebook that only the top 1% of sports fans would see those ads!

      On the upside, seeing ads for crap you don't want shows that whatever digital sanitation you are practicing is probably working to some extent. It's when they start showing you ads for stuff you WANT that you should be worried about how invasive their profile on you is.

  • FBP is the way to go -- I've used it for year. It blocks all sorts of Facebook intrusions while on the site. It also supports modifying the UI behavior (e.g. time line chronological or whatever), filtering posts by keywords, all kinds of bells and whistles. It's open source, the author accepts donations.

    https://www.fbpurity.com/ [fbpurity.com]

    Not affiliated with them in any way (in fact, I think Steeeve is a bit of a jerk some times). Only a happy user.

    Cheers!

  • The issue isn't that Facebook has ads, the issue is that Facebook is beholden to their advertisers. You're still going to get inconsistent moderation and advertisements.... I mean "Suggested for you" threads where people bicker and that drives engagement.

    Meta, if you want me to even start considering to pay a membership fee, then you need to get your sponsored bullshit out COMPLETELY, not just hide some of it for some users.

    (on an off-topic note I'm paying for "Ad-free" Paramount+ but I'm still forced to

  • Wow, all those spam emails from decades ago claiming that Zuck was going to start charging for Facebook were right after all!

    • Wow, all those spam emails from decades ago claiming that Zuck was going to start charging for Facebook were right after all!

      It's a long time since I've been to facebook, but last time I was on their login page it said "It's free and always will be." Not that it surprises me that facebook would lie to us :-)

  • At last!... (Score:3)

    by sacrilicious ( 316896 ) <qbgfynfu.opt@recursor.net> on Tuesday October 03, 2023 @01:39PM (#63897255) Homepage
    ... paying customers will no longer be the product!! (right?...)
  • Pay me to use the platform.
  • Does this mean you can actually see posts from people you actually follow again?

  • Welp, they can keep their ads (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sinkskinkshrieks ( 6952954 ) on Tuesday October 03, 2023 @02:06PM (#63897379)
    I've already peaced out from "social" media. This is corporate rent-seeking that will drive good creators elsewhere. The enshitification of most things corporate continues while they make record profits, which is also contributing to 60% of inflation. Thanks corporate schmucks!

  • Honestly I would've paid this years ago, but the amount of crap crammed into my feed now and it's impossible to tell what's an ad and what's "content recommended by Facebook"--and I use an adblocker on Firefox. It's too little, too late.

  • Maybe $1-2 per user per month from their ad revenue. And yet they want to charge $14-17 just so that people say "fine, we'll take the ads"

  • I'm delighted (Score:3)

    by a5y ( 938871 ) on Tuesday October 03, 2023 @02:41PM (#63897519)

    I'm delighted. No, really. I'm fucking sick of my relations asking me "Why aren't YOU on WhatsApp?/Instagram?" and the idea that they're going to get served ads from whoever will fling money at the empire "They Trust Me. Dumb Fucks." built means either that problem is gonna go away or I get to see them huffing copium as the enshitification tide comes in. AHAHAHAHA. YES. YESSSSSSSS.

  • WTF people?!? Every time you post, like, read, send a picture, or comment, FB analyzes you, your friends, your family, your locations, your proclivities and sells you to advertisers. You have no privacy in their minds and actions. And they have repeatedly and unscrupulously (illegally?) pulled your data whenever possible from 3rd party sites and sold it to anyone willing to pay. That’s their business model. You are NOT the customer, you are the product. And for the privilege of selling me, the

  • So TikTok is poised to increase its market share in the EU

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