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Meta Considers Charging For Ad-Free Facebook and Instagram In the UK (bbc.com) 46

Posted by BeauHD from the what-to-expect dept.
Meta is considering a paid subscription in the UK that would remove advertisements from its platform. The BBC reports: Under the plans, people using the social media sites could be asked to pay for an ad-free experience if they do not want their data to be tracked. Meta already provides ad-free subscriptions for Facebook and Instagram users in the EU, starting from euros (5 pounds) a month. A spokesperson for the firm said the company was "exploring the option" of offering a similar service in the UK.

They said the firm was "engaging constructively" with the UK data watchdog about the subscription service, following a consultation in 2024. The Information Commissioner's Office previously said it expected Meta to consider data protection concerns before it launched an ad-free subscription. Meta says personalized advertising allows its platforms to be free at the point of access.

Guidance issued by the regulator in January states that users must be presented with a genuine free choice. Social media platforms such as Meta heavily rely on ad revenues, and the company says personalised advertising allows its platforms to be free. Advertising accounted for more than 96% of its revenue in its latest quarterly financial results.

Meta Considers Charging For Ad-Free Facebook and Instagram In the UK More | Reply

Meta Considers Charging For Ad-Free Facebook and Instagram In the UK

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  • A fool and their money... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 24, 2025 @10:16PM (#65257113)

    Under the plans, people using the social media sites could be asked to pay for an ad-free experience if they do not want their data to be tracked.

    Facebook is a totally trustworthy company. They would never still track you and sell the data, even if you don't see ads anymore. Trust them.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Gavino ( 560149 )
      Don't know why this is mod 0. I guess Facebook have a bunch of mod points, and AI bots.
    • Maybe if a person spends so much time on Facebook that the ads bother them to the point where they want to pay to make them go away, the problem is not really the ads but simply the fact they spend way too fucking much time on Facebook.

      • Re:A fool and their money... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by war4peace ( 1628283 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2025 @02:50AM (#65257363)

        I wasn't spending much time on Facebook, when I had it. Less than 30 minutes a day, and that was mostly interacting in dedicated craft and hobby groups, which were useful.
        The problem with ads was the sheer amount of fake / scam / retarded ads. Deepfakes of known local politicians telling me to invest in this and the other, absolutely retarded and fake video game ads apparently aimed at 5 year olds, outright scams, and so on. Plus, my hundreds of ad reports yielded exactly zero results.
        When a genuine short video about some engineering trick is interrupted by an ad displaying some low-effort character not being able to add 1+1 in some low-effort video game, with the text "only 10% of players beat this level!!!", well, that was the breaking point for me. I can rot my own brain if I choose so.
        My Facebook account stays disabled for the foreseeable future. The mental health gains far outweighed the risk of brain damage from those ads.

        • My Facebook account stays disabled for the foreseeable future. The mental health gains far outweighed the risk of brain damage from those ads.

          uBlock Origin + FB Purity "solves" the facebook ad problem. Every few months they make a change that FB Purity doesn't keep up with and sponsored posts crawl back into your feed for two or three days, then it gets updated and everything is fine again. Also, accessing Feceboot with the right options [facebook.com] gets you the content that you actually want to see. I still don't have it well tamed on mobile (where I use the browser and not the app because anyone who trusts their app is a dumb fuck) where I do still see spo

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by mjwx ( 966435 )

            My Facebook account stays disabled for the foreseeable future. The mental health gains far outweighed the risk of brain damage from those ads.

            uBlock Origin + FB Purity "solves" the facebook ad problem. Every few months they make a change that FB Purity doesn't keep up with and sponsored posts crawl back into your feed for two or three days, then it gets updated and everything is fine again. Also, accessing Feceboot with the right options [facebook.com] gets you the content that you actually want to see. I still don't have it well tamed on mobile (where I use the browser and not the app because anyone who trusts their app is a dumb fuck) where I do still see sponsored content, but on desktop it's fine.

            Add in Privacy Badger for good measure.

            Facebook is pretty much unusable without all three browser extensions. As you've said it's a bit of an arms race but ultimately one that Meta is losing. That being said, I'm finding fewer and fewer reasons to go back to facebook these days, mostly because more and more people I know are also finding fewer and fewer reasons to go back there.

            • I use it for various groups, and almost nothing else.

              Like I did on X before getting kicked off for mocking Leon, the rest of my use is just getting and sharing antiestablishment memes

    • Facebook replacing Signal (Score:5, Funny)

      by Epeeist ( 2682 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2025 @04:18AM (#65257439) Homepage

      Facebook is a totally trustworthy company. They would never still track you and sell the data, even if you don't see ads anymore. Trust them.

      I understand that after today's security fuck up [nytimes.com] the Trump administration will be replacing Signal by Facebook.

  • Reminds me of Pay TV (Score:5, Informative)

    by Gavino ( 560149 ) on Monday March 24, 2025 @10:55PM (#65257151)
    In Australia, many years ago I was excited to sign up for pay TV, thinking, "I am prepared to pay money to not see any darn ads". And initially it was a mostly ad-free experience. But then Pay TV got greedy, and not only did the monthly subscription fees go up, but the amount of ads increased to the "threshold of pain" just like on free-to-air TV.

    This is basically monopoly rent behavior. Once they get exclusive access to the content (no competition), they (1) charge money, (2) insert ads.
    It's not either/or - it's both! So Facebook must think they are so big and dominating now that they can get away with this as they have no competition. They might say they are not going to show ads and that might be true initially, but as my Pay TV experience has shown.... the ads will come in slowly.... boiling the frog. And the privacy raping will continue unabated - that you can be sure of. So now we know what the end-game is, the only card up our sleaves as I see it is to not pay them, or alternatively not use the service at all. (please don't let the FB bots mod this to oblivion, but I'm sure they will).

    • Re:Reminds me of Pay TV (Score:4, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2025 @05:27AM (#65257499) Homepage Journal

      The only streaming service I use is YouTube, because you can block the ads effectively. For everything else I just head to The Pirate Bay these days. It's too much hassle to manage subscriptions and then deal with the ads that shouldn't even be there. They made the experience so bad that I just can't be bothered with it.

      If YouTube ever becomes impossible to use without ads, I'll cancel YouTube Premium and just switch to having a script download my subscriptions and then delete them after a few days.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Gavino ( 560149 )
        Do you use PiHole, browser extension, both, or maybe something else? I can block YouTube ads pretty well on my PC, but get smashed with them on the iPad. I don't have PiHole installed yet - have been meaning to do that for some time, but just get too busy with other things.

    • ' thinking, "I am prepared to pay money to not see any darn ads"'

      Did they actually offer that, or did you just make up something to be mad about?

      In the US, people are constantly lying about cable TV early on promising no ads when it would not even be technically feasible to offer since the ad slots are in the channel as broadcast.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Gavino ( 560149 )
        It was so long ago I really can't recall exactly. I'm talking late 90's. I thought at the time it was all about "ad-free TV" but yeah I'm foggy on the details. I just remember it being a much better experience back in the day. And then.... enshitification. It was probably legal. There are those semi-regular emails saying that the Terms and Conditions have changed and like most people - I never read them. I'm sure if those agreements could be dug up, that they'd say something about having more ads in the pr

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by larwe ( 858929 )
        Ad-free viewing and a larger number of channels were the two selling points of the first cable systems in Australia (CATV came to Aus MUCH later than to the USA). I wasn't around when the enshittification started, but it's the usual boiling the frog situation - ads between programs became ads in the middle of programs.
    • Right?! I watched them string the cables down my street in Melbourne in the 90s and I thought "hmmm, it might be worth paying for ad-free TV". But I never got around to it, and I moved to the USA in 1999, where I _had_ to sign up for cable because I lived in a semi-legal basement apartment. Suddenly I was paying $100 a month for an experience that was 45% ads by weight.

  • The wrong way round surely (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Alain Williams ( 2972 ) <addw@phcomp.co.uk> on Monday March 24, 2025 @11:35PM (#65257195) Homepage

    Facebook should be paying those to whom it displays ads; ads cost the end user:

    * Time wasted viewing the ad -- even if it is just to identify it as an ad and ignore it

    * Bandwidth wasted downloading the ad -- which will make other downloads slower

    * Interrupted workflow

    • Re:The wrong way round surely (Score:4, Informative)

      by Jeremi ( 14640 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2025 @01:04AM (#65257289) Homepage

      Facebook should be paying those to whom it displays ads; ads cost the end user

      Meta would argue that they do pay the user, in the form of providing the user with social media services. For better or worse, users seem to prefer that arrangement over the fork-over-some-cash-in-return-for-services one.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by DrXym ( 126579 )

      Lots of Facebook ads are outright scams too. Not to mention campaigns have bought elections with ads, so even a free service comes with a cost.

      Personally I consider that any social media platform that uses real-life personal information to be so toxic that the best advice is not to use it at all or use it sparingly and esoterically to minimize potential harm - don't provide personal info like relationships/birthdays/jobs/politics/sexuality/interests or falsify it if compelled, don't upload pictures, don't u

  • Disconnect Meta (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GrahamJ ( 241784 ) on Monday March 24, 2025 @11:35PM (#65257197)

    Meta is a terrible company run by terrible people. Delete your accounts today.

    The last time this idea came up they weasel-worded it to imply you wouldn't be tracked, but no, you just wouldn't be shown ads but will still have zuck creeping your every move across their properties and the rest of the web.

    Stay away

  • I'm not talking about using an adblocker, which I do, but the big companies are working around it. I notice that Slashdot no longer permits me to turn off ads... thank you so much. But, honestly, I don't even see them any more, they're not part of my field of vision. They're just some irritation at the edge of my eye. I have no concept of whether they're hawking a fragrant new toenail cream or some cruddy politician. They just don't even exist to me except as blocky obstructions that I didn't want there.

    • I'm one of those who can't turn off information influx. I can't fall asleep if the TV is running, can't ignore ads, and even worse, some of them get stuck in my head, because they are crafted in this manner.
      That's why I have a YouTube premium subscription, my LAN is covered by Pi-Hole and I stop accessing websites which force me to display ads (unless they are important to me AND offer an ad-free subscription). Facebook was not important enough, so I disabled my account there.
      Recently, a big YouTube streame

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by DrXym ( 126579 )

      I use an ad blocker and I've seen occasional websites which refuse to work unless I disable ad blocking. Some might complain I'm missing out on the "optimal" experience by ad blocking. But most work fine. It actually surprises me there are not more doing this since it should be easy to do - put a "secret" in some JS that is served by an advertiser and look for it later and if its not there, the person is blocking ads.

      I've also seen a lot of news websites where they will force visitors to accept optional coo

    • It's the ads you don't see... those are the most effective.

  • ... they'll throw in some lame "I'm more important than you" features to elevate posts so that instead of cream rising to the top it will be turds.

  • Wonder if the existance of shadow profiles makes that extortion then.

  • They're late to the party. All the controversies around spying for profit and aggressive advertising have damaged them so far that no subscription ever is going to help them. It will all eventually collapse, and probably quite soon.

  • Most people don't care, and if they do in a year it will be with carefully selected adverts

  • The platform has evolved for tracking and targeting for many years. It's the primary design goal of the platform, because it drives extended engagement sessions (=more ad impressions) and - in theory (more smoke and mirrors here) higher click through rates (=higher prices for each ad impression). Without those drivers, the entire user experience would be radically different. But anyway, who would believe "we're not tracking you any more" from this company? There will simply be an "oopsie kitty" moment when
  • So more and more people can give you the big middle finger that you deserve.

  • I would pay a small amount (let's say $5/month) for a social media platform that showed me all posts only from people and groups I follow, and strictly in reverse chronological order. No ads, no sponsored posts, no privacy-invasion, and no monkeying with hiding posts sometimes and not other times.

    Oh wait... I don't have to pay for that. I already have it for free [mastodon.social].

  • IF (and that if statement is doing some really heavy lifting here) I could trust Meta, I'd gladly pay for an official "no ads, not tracking" experience.. however, that if has an and to it...

    The and being "AND they provide a default 'no algorithm, just show me my friends feed' experience"

    Yes I know you can use
    https://www.facebook.com/?filt... [facebook.com]

    To kind of get that but like ... make it work.

    The issues with FB are not just about the ads but about their constant need to "get you to engage" it leads to the algorith

  • They're taking away our ads? Please, please don't tell me that they're going to take away the bot-postings, also!

  • Why? (Score:2)

    by thsths ( 31372 )

    Facebook has turned into a complete cesspit. Who would pay for that?

  • They want your credit card.

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