Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services, i.e. how many people pay for paid personal e-mail services?
I just don't want to believe that our services have to be paid for through proxy by giving huge cut to 3rd parties. The quality goes down both as UX and as core content, our attention span is destroyed, our privacy is violated and our political power is being stolen as content gets curated by those who extract money by giving us the "free" services.
It's simply very inefficient. IMHO we should go back to pay for what you use, this can't go on forever. There must be way to turn everything into a paid service where you get what you paid for and have your lives enhanced instead of monetized by proxy.
Xenoamorphous · 3h ago
I remember when Whatsapp became a paid app, I can’t remember the details as I believe they varied by platform (iOS vs Android) but it was either €0.79 or €0.99, I’m not sure if one off or yearly payment, but it doesn’t matter.
I, as the “computer guy”, had friends and family asking how to pirate it. This is coming from SMS costing €0.25 per message (text only!) and also coming from people who would gladly pay €3 for a Coke at a bar that they’d piss down the toilet an hour later. It didn’t matter if it only took 3 or 4 messages to make Whatsapp pay off for itself, as they were sending dozens if not hundreds of messages per day, either images, videos and whatnot (MMSs were much more expensive).
At that moment I realised many (most?) people would never pay for software. Either because it’s not something physical or because they’re stuck in the pre-Internet (or maybe music) mentality where copying something is not “stealing” as it’s digital data (but they don’t realise running Whatsapp servers, bandwidth etc cost very real money). And I guess this is why some of the biggest digital services are ad-funded.
In contrast, literally never someone has voiced privacy concerns, they simply find ads annoying and they’ve asked for a way to get rid of them (without paying, of course).
I should say, I’m from one of the European countries with the highest levels of piracy.
socalgal2 · 2m ago
> people would never pay for software.
I see this and not see this.
See this = friend wants to check out app but it costs $1-$3. I'm like, that's less than a coffee or a candy bar that you consume disposably. Why not just try it and if it's sucks throw it away, the same way you might with a new food item? That argument doesn't work on them for some reason.
not see = Steam
makeitdouble · 2h ago
> people would never pay for software.
I mostly share your conclusion, but I think there is a specific twist: most people will pay for on the spot transactions.
We see it in spades for games: in-app purchases and season passes have a lower barrier of acceptance. I assume buying stones to unlock a character must be thought at the same level as buying coffee, as just a one-time purchase that doesn't require further calculations.
bobthepanda · 1h ago
at least for some of it what's nice is that you are getting exactly what you paid for on the tin, and most importantly you are not getting locked into some god-awful subscription with a cancellation process akin to pulling teeth.
the urge to buy goes down if the subscription is cheap enough ($.99 songs versus $12 a spotify subsscription) but having been through my fair share of attempting contract cancellations this isn't surprising.
bsoles · 2h ago
The problem with paying a small fee for a service is not the fee itself. It is the friction for paying for the service and the hassle that comes after the payment.
Now the credit card company knows what service I am buying; I would get endless marketing emails from the service for buying additional things; my info as a person willing to pay for such a service would get sold to other companies; my credit card info would get leaked/stolen, ...
If the whole experience was literally as simple as handing someone a $1 bill, I promise I would pay for many many internet services.
Xenoamorphous · 2h ago
I can guarantee none of your concerns apply to the people I was talking about, particularly the privacy ones. These people would pay for their meal at a restaurant using their debit/credit card without hesitation, and they still do, and that’s arguably more likely to get your card details stolen, and the issuer knowing about your life. Those worries you’re citing never crossed their minds. They just didn’t want to pay a tiny amount of money for an “abstract” thing.
rconti · 1h ago
I was just thinking about this the other day -- hotels so badly want me to book directly with them instead of using, say Booking.com.
But then to book directly and get the "guaranteed cheapest!" price, I have to sort through even more options than on an aggregator, I have to create an account, and now I'm getting spammed from ANOTHER entity I never plan to do business with again. At least with the aggregators I have one company whose privacy settings I've already dealt with.
ab_testing · 1h ago
I book with hotels directly almost all the time and never receive marketing spam just regular mail about my upcoming start. Also booking with the hotel lets me select options not available on booking sites like king vs 2 queen bed options, ADA compliant rooms and even floor options. Also if you have AAA or some other memberships, those codes can easily beat discount sites like Booking.com
mikedelfino · 2h ago
> It is the friction for paying for the service and the hassle that comes after the payment.
I don't know. Paying for streaming services seems very natural nowadays.
xandrius · 2h ago
I really don't buy that the reason is the "tracking".
It's the friction of paying for something at all. There is no free sandwich, so people don't generally expect it, on the other hand there's plenty of free software.
cherryteastain · 1h ago
On the other hand, I did pay the $1 for Whatsapp back in the day and I was promised it'd be ad free. Want that $1 back, I actually even deleted my account and uninstalled Whatsapp!
fossuser · 1h ago
I feel a bit for Brian Acton - iirc he refused to sell because the 500M users paying $500M dollars was more than enough to fund his tiny team (of 30?), but when the offer went up to 19B$ it's just kind of hard to turn down - there's extreme opportunity cost there. Most people would sell before that, 19B$ of principle is quite a lot.
I think it's just if you're empire building - and Zuck is insanely good at this, one of the best - then it'll never be optimal to charge vs. grow massively and then monetize the larger attention base.
Zuck is also in a trench warfare competition with other social media players, it's far from a monopoly. He's historically been more inclined to do things that were worse for growth, but better for users when they had more of a dominant position - but he can't do that anymore.
Somewhat relatedly Apple really missed an opportunity with iMessage. Had they timed it right they could have had a dominant cross platform chat. Instead they're going to be stuck with the modern equivalent of BBM while Zuck and Meta erase their only remaining stronghold in the US as iPhone users continue to move to WhatsApp.
Melatonic · 8m ago
Highly doubt that - I feel like most people I communicate with on WhatsApp are for group chats vs individual messages might be imesssage or signal or many other platforms.
Zak · 1h ago
Now Brian Acton has a huge pile of money to help fund Signal, so I don't think he has to feel too terrible about selling out.
> Somewhat relatedly Apple really missed an opportunity with iMessage. Had they timed it right they could have had a dominant cross platform chat.
Google also had the opportunity to do this. Around the same time iMessage launched, Google made Hangouts the default SMS app on Android with a similar capability to upgrade to Internet-based messaging when all parties to a conversation had it. Hangouts was cross-platform. Rumor has it carriers whined and Google caved.
I'm kind of glad Google doesn't have a dominant messaging service, but it's only true due to their own lack of commitment.
RestlessMind · 29m ago
I used Hangouts including the dogfood versions internally at Google. Problem was it was too complicated because it was designed by Googlers for Googlers. So it supported desktop and mobile, work email and personal email and phone numbers, text and video, and so on. In short, every single complexity conceivable was crammed into the app.
Whereas Whatsapp was simple - only phone numbers to sign up, only text and images, only mobile phones. That simplicity meant my parents could onboard smoothly and operate it without having to navigate a maze of UX. I literally saw Whatsapp winning in real time vs Hangouts and other alternatives.
Zak · 10m ago
Thanks for the insider perspective.
I used Hangouts for a while and had a bunch of contacts on it when it was Android's default SMS app. Many of them were not particularly technical, including one of my parents whom I don't recall telling to use it. If you were using an Android phone, you were probably already logged in to a Google account. iPhone users had to work a little harder for it (install the app and remember the password to the Gmail account they probably already had).
I don't recall the UX on the mobile client having extra complexity over other messaging apps if I didn't go digging in the settings, but it's been a while.
simfree · 37s ago
I think the concept of a user having an existing Gmail account if they aren't in the Google ecosystem is a bit of hubris.
There are many people I run across who bypassed the whole Gmail and Google Workspace ecosystems and have rolled along merrily with me.com and other email providers.
It's not a given that users will have bothered to register for a Google account unless they grew up in the Bay Area after a certain time period.
Wind back the clock to when Google tried to roll out Hangouts and the Gmail penetration rate was even lower among the non-Android users out there.
pesus · 59m ago
Is there any data that shows people in the US are switching to WhatsApp? The only people I've ever seen use it are people with family in other countries. The statistics I've seen indicate that iPhone usage amongst American teenagers is high and still increasing(1), which almost certainly would lead to higher iMessage usage.
There's no way they actually earned $500M/year. Even if Whatsapp had 100 employees making $200k/year on average, that's $20M on salaries. Add an another very generous $80M on infra/admin etc costs and they'd have been making $400M profit. With that much profit achieved within such a short period, in the QE funny money era they could have IPO'd at $50-100 billion easily.
RestlessMind · 27m ago
Correct. I used Android phones back then and so did all my family members and most of my friends. No one I knew paid a dime for Whatsapp.
ocdtrekkie · 1h ago
I have not had someone ask me to use WhatsApp in nearly ten years, I deal with people on iMessage every day...
Balooga · 37m ago
Africa runs on WhatsApp.
Went to South Africa on vacation last year. United lost our luggage on the first leg of the trip, which then became South African Airways responsibility to sort out because they handled our final leg.
I communicated directly with the SAA baggage agent over WhatsApp. Then communicated over WhatsApp with the courier delivering our bags . Best customer service ever.
Zak · 1h ago
I can predict the country you live in with reasonable reliability from this comment alone.
This would not be true most places outside of the USA and maybe Canada. In a few countries/regions it might be a different third-party messaging app.
ocdtrekkie · 42m ago
Obviously, but the parent talks about Apple losing its US market to WhatsApp. Not sure that's remotely realistic, and them adding advertising only makes it even less realistic.
jmknoll · 59m ago
Are you in North America? I’ve found this to be true in the US, but not in Europe or Asia.
als0 · 1h ago
Meanwhile in Europe it’s the opposite.
AshamedCaptain · 42m ago
You can still survive without Facebook-crap perfectly. On the other hand it's hard to survive without either an Android or iPhone device.
yibg · 2h ago
Similar situation as flights. People complain about lack of space, misc fees etc. But when it comes down to it, people for the most part, still pick the cheapest flight.
I think the other factor is a bit of anchoring. I know this impacts me anyways. If there is a "free" alternative, then that's where I'm anchored at. I can watch youtube for free so paying for it seems like a bad deal. Where as there is no free alternative to Coke that still gets your Coke (as opposed to say water).
sdeframond · 2h ago
> when it comes down to it, people for the most part, still pick the cheapest flight.
Flight comparators don't show "avaliable legroom" in their metrics.
As far as I know some companies charge more for seats near entrances where there's more space, so people are willing to pay more.
JumpCrisscross · 2h ago
> As far as I know some companies charge more for seats near entrances where there's more space, so people are willing to pay more
In my anecdotal experience, the people complaining about leg room are precisely those who are not paying for additional leg room. (Similar to how people who compare modern air travel with service in the 1960s aren't purchasing the inflation-adjusted equivalent ticket, which would almost always be a lay-flat seat today if not Wheels Up.)
SkyeCA · 28m ago
I may be the exception, but as someone who's 194cm tall I am both paying for more legroom and complaining about legroom.
skeeter2020 · 1h ago
Google flights does - at least as well as they can base don the airline and plane. They'll also compare this to the average. All airlines charge more for exit rows and their extra legroom, typically as "premium economy" seats.
6LLvveMx2koXfwn · 2h ago
I guess the point being Youtube versus Youtube without ads is as different as Coke versus water. But you're point holds in that people think they are the same service, as the ads bit, no matter how integral, is seen as 'other' than the service. This is a big win for the service provider. I remember when RyanAir charged £5 per flight plus £50 unavoidable add-ons, you ask anyone how much they paid, they said £5. Seems like the same thing here - we give the service provider too much kudos, it's as though consuming a service makes it part of us, so we big it up no matter if it's taking us for a ride.
noosphr · 2h ago
People pick the cheapest flights because price is a simple number they can understand.
How to you qualify the comfort of a seat with 20cm of legroom vs 30cm? Until we have a quality metric for flights that's also a single number we can't.
Symbiote · 1h ago
The price is one of the few things that's always available when choosing between flights. Journey time is the other, and people will pay for a shorter journey or shorter layovers.
Strangely, some of my colleagues have 'paid' (work's money, their time) extra to avoid Ryanair, when Ryanair has the only direct connection. This I find strange.
Given the choice, I've long paid a little more if it means an Airbus plane, as I think the cabin is quieter. However, that's rarely shown on flight booking sites.
herewulf · 1h ago
I'll happily pay more for an Airbus plane or even an older Boeing model because I prefer not to crash and die.
gsich · 1h ago
Or because back then only credit card payment was possible?
basisword · 3h ago
>> I, as the “computer guy”, had friends and family asking how to pirate it.
To be fair, that was in era when pirating was such a normal thing. Everybody at least knew about it. Cheap pirated DVD's were super common (I received them as gifts even) and everyone knew someone selling them. With people accustomed to paying for Netflix, music streaming, Office 365, etc. maybe a subscription version of WhatsApp would be more palatable. The problem is nobody will pay as long as the tech behemoths are offering the same thing for free.
schroeding · 2h ago
Interestingly, the pendulum at least in my friend group starts to kinda swing in the other direction, i.e. non-technical friends start to indirectly ask (me as the tech guy) about blatant piracy for (visual, Spotify is still very much accepted) media and (TOS-violating[1]) ad blockers for ad-supported streaming.
I cannot overstate how unexpected this was and is to me, we talk about people in their mid-twenties with jobs - maybe (video) streaming / subscriptions services actually overplayed their hand in the current economic climate.
Doesn't make me super optimistic in this regard.
[1] even if most of it is void in my jurisdiction anyway
nemomarx · 2h ago
Number of competing video services with distinct libraries has kinda put it back in vogue, I think. No one I've ever talked to is really happy about paying for more than 1-2 streaming services, especially if some of them only have one show they're interested in. If that show is really tempting it becomes tempting to just pirate Severance or what have you instead of signing up to one new service for it on top of Netflix et al.
ignoramous · 2h ago
> ... Whatsapp became a paid app ... it was either €0.79 or €0.99, I’m not sure if one off or yearly payment, but it doesn’t matter ...
Interestingly, WhatsApp put up paid plans to slow down user acquisition [0].
On Androids, in some countries, WhatsApp continued to work even if you didn't pay the $1/year fee.
I don’t have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a gigantic chunk of the “i would rather pay a small fee to use a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads” crowd is mostly all-talk. And I am saying this as someone who genuinely believes in the “small fee instead of paying with ad exposure” approach.
The one specific example of this that made me think so is the Youtube Premium situation. So many people in the “a fee instead of ads” crowd consumes YT for hours a day, but so far I’ve only met one person (not counting myself) who actually pays for YT Premium.
And yes, a major chunk of the people I talked about this with were FAANG engineers, so it isn’t like they cannot afford it. But it felt like they were more interested in complaining about the ad-funded-services landscape and muse on their stances around it, as opposed to actually putting their money where their mouth is.
All I can say is, I am not paying for YT Premium out of some ideological standpoint or love for Google (not even close). It has genuinely been just worth it for me many times over in the exact practical ways I was expecting it to.
kwijibob · 1h ago
YouTube announced in March that they have 125 million premium subscribers.
I think they are carefully riding the balance between being free for the masses with ads while milking those who have the funds to get rid of ads.
I reckon they will continue to increase their subscriber base where other streaming services are plateuing.
Certainly, YouTube Premium has been worth it for me. A big quality of life improver.
Taking the YouTube example, and many others like it, I only use it because it is free.
If YouTube was subscription only, hypothetically, I would just not use it, and my life would be same as it is now.
There are a great many services that are nice to have, but very few I would bother paying for out of my wallet. Given the choice of paying for them or not using them, I would just walk away from most of them.
scrivanodev · 3h ago
What would you replace YouTube with? To my its educational value is unmatched. I owe so much of my learning to it.
appreciatorBus · 52m ago
YouTube's educational value can be unmatched, but it doesn't follow that 99% of time spent on YouTube is educational or even useful.
I'd bet the ratio of time I have spent legit learning something useful vs just using it as distraction/entertainment ("educational" channels are often just entertainment for nerds like us)/background, it has to be something like 1000 to 1. I wouldn't need to replace the 999 at all. I guess I would read books a bit more, probably get a lot more done on personal projects, go out a bit more etc.
Not clear at all my life would be worse off except in that pinch where I need to know how to disassemble & fix the thing, right now.
mac-mc · 1h ago
IMO if youtube was an actual paid service, I would also expect a lot of the advertiser driven demonitization actions to go away when your in paid mode, but it isn't so I still miss out on a lot of potentially interesting topics or things that could be talked about, but are not, due to the chilling effects of the demonitization & deboosting police.
nkrisc · 2h ago
I don't know what I would replace YouTube with, because YouTube is free so I have never needed to consider alternatives.
But for the most part - probably nothing. For everything else, it'd just be either some other free option, or like going back to the internet of the early 2000s, which would be good and bad in its own ways.
nytesky · 2h ago
Can you elaborate on your learning journey? How did you separate out the worthless content from quality education programs? Very few Unis post lectures anymore, so it’s all hit or miss for me.
hiq · 3h ago
What did you learn thanks to it?
LtWorf · 2h ago
How to open my computer
halfcat · 2h ago
On the flip side, I’ll pay $10/month for 10 streaming services I never use (and have forgotten about), but on a Saturday night if a movie isn’t available and I have to pay $3.99 to rent it I never pay that. Instead I’ll drive to the corner store and spend $20 on snacks, and come home and watch YouTube with ads.
People are curious creatures indeed.
danillonunes · 2h ago
I paid like $2 to rent a movie about three years ago and didn't watched it entirely and boy it still hurts.
wvh · 3h ago
I am conflicted because to some extent, paying for some of these services feels like paying a blackmailer, spying on you, holding a whole ecosystem hostage and even jeopardising mental health and the public discourse.
I pay for email and some other services. Some other services, not so much. I find it hard to support some companies financially because I don't agree with their basic modus operandi. It's not the money; it's who it goes to.
If only we could convince large crowds to choose more free alternatives.
sigotirandolas · 2h ago
To be devil's advocate, this is the kind of all-talk argument the parent was referring to. Once the paid option is available, people will demand it to be [cheaper / better / someone else] and still not pay.
While I don't love my money going to Google, I find YouTube's overall quality astronomically higher than Instagram/Twitter/TikTok/etc. and the amount of censorship/"moderation"/controversy has been relatively limited. When I find something I really want to keep I have always been able to download it without much trouble.
rconti · 1h ago
I'm about to start paying for YouTube for the first time ever. Of course, they make it complicated because I don't actually want their bundled music service. And the "lite" version says most videos are ad-free. But what's preventing them from changing that deal the day after I sign up? And of course, once I become a customer, now I'm hooked, and I'm subject to their arbitrary price increases.
Of course, as a "free" customer I'm already subject to their whims whenever they decide to add another advertising layer.
tcfhgj · 1h ago
Don't start, please
Guest9081239812 · 3h ago
My site has about 30k active registered users a day. The vast majority are long term members that have been on the site for years, so they're quite dedicated to the service. Even so, only about 50 of them pay to remove advertising.
cookie_monsta · 3h ago
This is really interesting. Can you say how much it costs the user to remove ads?
stavros · 3h ago
How much do you make per user on ads, and how much is the subscription?
Guest9081239812 · 2h ago
It only generates about 15k a year in ad revenue. It's fairly low revenue because:
1. Users are spread around the world. This isn't a site with 70% US visitors.
2. The majority of users run ad block, and this continues to rise.
3. Ad rates plummet each year. I earn about 5x less on the site now, than in the past, with the same number of active users, and 3x as many advertisements.
I've tried all the major advertising networks. I setup header bidding and signed direct deals with large networks, such as AppNexus, Amazon, Yahoo, AOL, etc. At the end of the day, ads do not pay well for my audience.
Users can pay $3/mo to remove advertising. Yes, I'm aware that's $36/yr, when the average registered user is generating less than $0.50/yr in ad revenue. About 30% of paying users choose to pay higher than $3/mo for no additional benefit (they can pay any amount they wish). I also have some individuals that have paid thousands of dollars.
What would happen if I offered a $1/yr plan for an ad free experience, so it's more inline with ad revenues? I honestly don't know, but I would guess I would lose a few of the $3/mo paying users, and gain less than 100 users paying $1/yr, so it would likely be net negative.
tobias3 · 1h ago
This illustrates a bit the price discrimination "problem" that is solved via ads. With ads, higher-income people probably earn you more money automatically.
With the fee to remove advertising, you'd need to use all the price discrimination tricks to maximize revenue. E.g., have sales, have discount codes, etc., and it would still not be close to the price discrimination possible via ads.
I also wonder what the income of OP's bubble was when they were not paying for WhatsApp.
tcfhgj · 1h ago
I am not interested in paying Google for anything. It's a company too big and powerful through immoral business (ads)
I block all ads and wish commercial ads would cease to exist even though it would mean I couldn't use somethings anymore without payment.
cameldrv · 7h ago
I know lots of people that pay for YT premium. Lots of people pay for Spotify too. I even pay for Kagi.
Marsymars · 56m ago
Getting my work to pay for Kagi was an easy conversation compared to how I’d imagine me asking them to pay for YouTube or Spotify would go.
yapyap · 3h ago
Spotify I get because the Spotify free experience is HORRID.
Youtube is also moving into that direction.
Hoasi · 3h ago
It's unclear to me how the paid Spotify experience compares with free, but you still get ads with the paid one. Also, you need to curate heavily because Spotify's algorithm will push certain types of content. If you listen to a podcast once, it is hard to get rid of it, as it will keep popping into your feed, or whatever they call their interface.
qwerpy · 1h ago
I rage quit my Spotify subscription after my first "sponsored" in the mobile app. Some people may tolerate ads in their paid subscriptions but many of us won't.
openplatypus · 2h ago
Omg I literally puke with Shopify ads in podcasts.
Whats the point of paid, premium service like Spotify if I keep being served those stupid, dishonest and bordeline illegally deceiving Shopify ads every 15 minutes.
TingPing · 1h ago
Because the ad has literally nothing to do with Spotify? Podcasters can say or sell whatever.
jobigoud · 3h ago
I think a good amount of people pay for Youtube just to be able to listen to audio with the screen off, which is a completely artificial restriction they added to the free version.
Such a strange business model, making the free version below acceptable.
timewizard · 3h ago
> Such a strange business model, making the free version below acceptable.
That's because the core product is not anywhere near worth what they charge for it. The youtube interface is a nightmare for users and creators alike. I have very little controls over what I do and don't see, how I can filter or search for content, or how I can search for new content. History of both videos and comments are effectively non existent and impossible to reasonably search or archive.
It's not a service so much as it is a copyright clearinghouse.
If they had an actual experience with worthwhile features to offer then they wouldn't have to artificially degrade the free experience to convince you.
wat10000 · 29m ago
I feel the exact opposite. YouTube is the only streaming service I pay for, and it's well worth it. I have no trouble finding things I want to watch and there's a huge amount of it. Other services don't have nearly as much good stuff, and it's too hard to find among the crap.
tensor · 1h ago
I'm honestly pretty damn pissed that even though I pay for the top tier of Spotify I still now get ads in podcasts on the platform. Yes, I can skip them for now, but when you're driving that's not always easy, and I have no doubt the "you can't skip them" is coming.
Absolute bullshit.
nytesky · 2h ago
YT Premium is pretty expensive. I think it costs as much for one user for a multi-device plan on Netflix?
They don’t create nor curate much content.
I am curious about the poster who has learned so much from YouTube — I have tried learning many topics from science to programming to home repairs, and finding a quality program can be very challenging, and there are a lot of programs which are actually elaborate sales pitches.
qwerpy · 1h ago
There's great content on YouTube but there's a lot of garbage. AI-generated slop, clickbait thumbnails/titles that actually don't payout, sales pitches, and plain old low-quality garbage. The lack of a thumbs down really makes it hard to avoid these. I realize that thumbs down is also used to punish "wrong" political viewpoints and companies, so it's a hard problem. But as a viewer who never uploads content, it only makes my experience worse.
Karrot_Kream · 41m ago
There's a "I don't want to see content like this" option you can signal on content and I find it works quite well
wat10000 · 26m ago
My recommended feed mostly consists of chess, machining, Mario Maker, fighter jets, and assorted other things like that, which is exactly what I want to see. There's some dumb stuff in there, but it's easy to skip over and it learns to recommend what I actually watch. And there is a thumbs-down button, at least for me.
maplant · 3h ago
I pay for YT Premium and Protonmail. Very happy to do so.
austhrow743 · 2h ago
Surely it has to be somewhat ideological given that adblockers exist? Have you seen your high paid engineer friends actually watching the ads?
I would rather pay a fee than watch ads, but as long as “do neither of those” is an option I’ll be picking that. If they remove that as an option I’ll either pay or not watch YouTube.
Probably not watch.
I pay for email, and was paying for search until something about the way kagi integrates with safari annoyed me. I’ve been paying more for a seedbox than Netflix costs for longer than Netflix has existed. That’s part for ad avoidance as in it initially replaced free to air tv but ad avoidance is just one factor in the best experience for my time and money trade off I’m trying to make. So i know I’m willing to both pay for things i can get ad supported from Google and also pay for a better media experience.
When it comes to that best experience for my time and money trade off though, even with money being set at zero, the vast majority of the YouTube i watch is already in the negative. Most things i watch on there, i regret the cost of just the time it took to watch the content before ads or money even gets in to it.
Which i think is a big part of the issue with ad supported internet going fee based. YouTube and so many ad supported sites and games are already just super low value and derive most of their consumption not from people making intentional lifestyle choices of “i want to be the kind of person who watches garbage all day while playing crap” but rather people making bad short term vs long term trade offs and falling in to holes of recommendations and fun looking thumbnails.
Paying for something leads to asking yourself “is this worth $x?” And i know that for at least myself $x is a large negative number. I’d pay more than the current cost of YouTube premium to definitely NOT be able to watch YouTube.
xigoi · 3h ago
I don’t want to pay for YouTube because the official app, even without ads, has a much worse UX than Tubular.
kalaksi · 3h ago
I don't use YT much, but if I did and paid for premium, I'd assume they'd still track me, monetize the data and utilize dark patterns and enshittified UX.
What I mean is that, IMO, ads by themselves are only a small part of the puzzle. Paying for YT premium doesn't sound enticing if it only gets rid of the ad part and not the surveillance machinery.
I do pay for my email that does no tracking and has good UX. I allow ads on duckduckgo because they actually respect my privacy and don't try to trick me all the time. I also pay for Spotify premium and have donated to Signal and Mozilla, but I won't support the likes of Google and Meta.
acheron · 1h ago
Exactly. The earlier post is overlooking the insanity of giving Google money, and acting as if they wouldn’t just track you harder now that you have to be logged in with an account connected to your real identity and a credit card. I wouldn’t pay for YouTube for the same reason I wouldn’t pay for Gmail. But I’m happy to pay for another email provider.
timewizard · 3h ago
> crowd is mostly all-talk.
I want to pay the small fee, through a simple to use portal, that makes it obvious how to cancel, and if I'm being obligated to a multi month term or not. I also want my payment card details to be perfectly secure and for none of my private information or usage to be sold to third parties.
> who actually pays for YT Premium.
Have you ever asked them "why don't you?" Or "what would it take to get you to pay?" Or even, "would you take a free month to see if it's worth it?"
Point being I don't think the problem is nearly as black and white as you've apparently surmised.
michaelt · 2h ago
Good news: Youtube Premium is trivial to cancel, comes with no multi-month obligations, and if you don't trust Google with your credit card you can pay for it with Google Play gift cards.
throw0101c · 7h ago
> I don’t have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a gigantic chunk of the “i would rather pay a small fee to use a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads” crowd is mostly all-talk.
Depends on the price.
I'm guessing lots of folks are paying $1/month to Apple to upgrade from the free 5GB tier of iCloud storage to get to the 50GB tier.
WhatsApp charged people $1 per year before being acquired by Facebook:
Supposedly about a billion people paid for that at the time. Even if they went to $1 per month, that'd be fairly cheap (and WhatsApp ran fairly lean, personnel-wise: fifty FTEs).
toast0 · 7h ago
> Supposedly about a billion people paid for that at the time.
(I worked for WhatsApp from 2011-2019)
From that article, user count was about 900 Million when the fee was ended; user count was about 450 M in Feb 2014 when the acquisition was announced [1]. Either way, it is a mistake to think everyone was paying.
A) Some people still had lifetime accounts from when the app was $1 for iPhone, or from the typical late December limited time free for iPhone promotions. Windows Phone got marked as lifetime for a while due to a bug/oversight that took a while to get noticed.
B) Enforcement was limited. A lot of users wouldn't have had a payment method that WhatsApp could accept; demanding payment when there's no way to pay isn't good for anybody. For a long time, we didn't even implement payment enforcement; we'd go through and extend subscriptions for a year, initially by manual script, then through automation. When we did build payment enforcement, I think we only set it on for Spain and maybe the US. Everywhere else would get the reminders that the account was going to expire, and then on the day of, it would silently extend the account and not bug you again for a while. Even where payment enforcement was on, it would only lock you out for I think a week, then your account would be extended and maybe you'd pay next time.
Adding on, for a lot of users, the hassle of paying $1 is a bigger deal than the actual $1; but so for people in lower income countries, it's both --- a) it's hard to pay $1 to a US country for a large number of people, b) there are countries with significant number of people living on a dollar a day; I don't think it's reasonable to ask them to forgo a days worth of living to pay for a messenger.
I don't remember numbers, and there's not a lot of financial reporting, because WhatsApp numbers are so small compared to the rest of FB/Meta, but there's a first half 2014 report [2] that shows revenue of $15M. Assuming payments are even over the year (probably not a good assumption, but we don't have good numbers), that'd be maybe 30 Million paying users (some users bought multiple years though), or less than 10%.
This is the story from the point of view of a user:
One day the app asked me to pay. It was less than 1 Euro per year, I think. I never associated a credit card to the app store (Android) so I did not pay and waited to see what would happen.
It kept asking for money for a few days but it kept working, so I thought they were not serious about it. Then it stopped asking. It started asking for money again after a few months but I remembered what happened before so I waited again. It kept working and eventually stopped asking for money. This pattern repeated a few times until maybe the time FB bought it.
I believe that if it stopped working people would have switched en masse to another app, maybe Telegram? We also had Viber and probably FB messenger too.
Switches happened many times in the 90s and early 2000s. I remember AIM, ICQ, MSN, then Skype. Whole networks of people moved to the next one or used more than one to message different friends. WhatsApp never had a chance to earn money directly from its users IMHO.
eddythompson80 · 3h ago
> Windows Phone got marked as lifetime for a while due to a bug/oversight that took a while to get noticed.
Huh, is that what it was... I had a Windows Phone 2012-2013 and I think I signed up for WhatsApp on it and I remember chatting with a friend on it and he was talking about the $1 per year thing and I went to check, and it said I have lifetime and I was confused how I ended up with that, but was using it so lightly that I didn't bother to look into why. I figured maybe there was a promotion the day I signed up or something.
toast0 · 1h ago
You're welcome. :) IIRC, the check was written so that if the platform was one of the enumerated platforms (android, s60, s40, bb) give a 1 year, otherwise give a lifetime, which was intended to be iPhone gets lifetime, but then windows phone happened.
IIRC, you had to have signed up with windows phone, switching phones to windows phone wouldn't grant you lifetime (switching to iPhone while the app was paid on iOS would; a delay on that was added to avoid abuse of borrow your friend's iPhone, re-register and then switch back).
dieortin · 1h ago
> When we did build payment enforcement, I think we only set it on for Spain and maybe the US.
Can I ask why Spain specifically?
toast0 · 1h ago
IIRC, user count / population was very high and users were likely to have payment methods we could accept, and $1/year is not a significant amount for most residents of Spain. I don't remember if maybe Spain had a high voluntary payment rate too?
The US never had a high user count, but it was chosen because US tech journalism sets the narrative. If you want people to pay around the world, convince US tech journalists that payment enforcement is on, and the knowledge that you need to pay filters through the world in a way that it doesn't by just enforcing payment in Spain.
See also: the invisibility of Nokia phones when they pissed off US carriers with SIP clients and left the US market; despite being the top selling phone manufacture of both feature phones and smart phones, there were no media stories about them.
KoolKat23 · 1h ago
If I recall right, WhatsApp tookaway our lifetime subscriptions like a year after buying it, saying it wasn't necessary or something and put everyone all on the same plan.
neves · 2h ago
Time to make it a public app and remove it from the private sector.
filoleg · 7h ago
Not to dismiss your point about pricing numbers (as it is valid and makes sense to me), but I don’t think iCloud comparison is that applicable to my argument, given there is no option to pay for larger iCloud storage with ad exposure.
What I was talking about was paying by being exposed to ads vs. paying directly, and increased iCloud storage has no former option.
Workaccount2 · 9h ago
By far the choice of most marginally savvy and above internet users is an ad-model where they themselves ad-block. Which somehow is spun to be morally righteous.
johncessna · 3h ago
Morally Righteous? I think it's more they don't have to so they don't. It's like the DVR days where you'd just fast forward ads. It wasn't a moral high ground, it was just easy to do and was better than the alternative.
card_zero · 2h ago
Dutifully watching the ads doesn't seem moral either, it seems insane.
pydry · 3h ago
Once google's shareholders have wet their beak, the on-campus sushi bars and manicurists and $400k pay packets are paid for and the Taylor Swifts of the world are paid off there isnt much left of your subscription to pay for the long tail of content creators who dont have Taylor Swift's leverage.
Which is why many of them say things like "skip these ads if you like Im not getting any of it" or "Im here primarily for exposure, I make my money elsewhere".
x0x0 · 3h ago
I accidentally browsed a site without ads this morning from my work profile.
Literally on the first link I clicked on on cbs the advertiser somehow figured out how to make my browser redirect to some super-sketchy site saying I was the 5 billionth google search and won blah blah blah.
Browsing without adblock is an unacceptable security risk so long as google et all refuse to audit and comprehensively secure the code they demand to run on my laptop.
LtWorf · 3h ago
Amazon prime had a lot of customers but they started to put ads to paying customers as well.
So the alternative seems to be "free, with ads" or "paid, with ads"
tehjoker · 3h ago
We could also have public services.
ElijahLynn · 3h ago
Paying for YT Premium is a no brainer. Especially for someone like myself with ADHD.
I love paying for ad-removal. Take. My. Money.
LtWorf · 1h ago
Everyone else just uses newpipe, mpv, and so on
mschuster91 · 9h ago
> I don’t have the actual stats, but, sadly, it seems like a gigantic chunk of the “i would rather pay a small fee to use a service rather than paying for it with exposure to ads” crowd is mostly all-talk.
That's because micropayments are still fucking annoying to do on both sides of any transaction:
- credit cards: cheap-ish at scale (2-5%), but users don't want to give random apps their CC details and integrating with Stripe/Paypal/whatever has the cost of UX flow break due to account details and 2FA compliance bullshit. In addition, every service paid-for by CC has the problem that only people with a CC can pay for it (so people in countries like Europe where "classic" bank accounts prevail are out of luck, and so are people in countries deemed too poor and/or fraud-affiliated are locked out entirely), and you gotta deal with tax and other regulatory compliance around handling payments as well. Oh and people will try to use your service to validate stolen payment credentials because a 1$ charge (especially for a well known service like Whatsapp) is most likely to be ignored by the accountholder even if fraudulent in nature, which in turn will lead to issues with chargebacks or, worst case, getting dropped entirely by the payment processor.
- in-app purchases: expensive (30% cut for the platform provider), serious headache to do when a significant chunk of the user base doesn't run phones with properly licensed Google Play Store (e.g. Huawei who aren't allowed to embed Play Store on their phones)
- bank transfer: possible, but restricted to the economic zones where there's enough customer base to justify the expenses of setting up a local company with a bank account (i.e. US, EU, India, possibly China), and transaction fees from the banks may end up being >>50% of the transaction's face value at such low amounts
- crxptxcurrency: even more of a hassle for customers to acquire, questionable legality / KYC issues, no realtime authorization due to mandatory waiting time for mining to confirm transactions
- pay by phone bill, premium numbers: possible, but need bureaucracy in each country, fraud / "my kid did it" complaints will run rampant, premium number calls are by default blocked in most if not all modern phone contracts ever since the early '00s and "dialer" fraud malware, difficult to associate with customer's phone number in the backend
In the end, if you truly want to capture a global audience with microtransaction payments, be prepared to deal with a loooooooooooooooooot of bullshit just to get started.
Long story short, we desperately need a global government effort to standardize payments at low fees. There's absolutely zero reason why banks and other intermediaries should be allowed to skim off more than 5% of any kind of transaction. ZERO.
UnreachableCode · 5h ago
Europe isn't a country. And we have credit cards here.
dgfitz · 3h ago
Wow. Way to flippantly shit on the paragraphs of explanation they gave of their own free time.
Europe though, yeah they’re killing it.
wheybags · 1h ago
Why should anyone appreciate paragraphs of text from someone who thinks Europeans can't use payment cards? What reason would I have to presume the content of said paragraphs is better informed, given they have trivially disprovable rubbish up front?
Workaccount2 · 9h ago
I can say from experience and from others who have been in this position (not email, but general services); its around 1-2% of people.
Nebula, the answer to the tyranny of Youtube (who works for advertisers), has a <1% conversion rate despite tons of huge Youtubers pushing it. Vid.me, the previous answer to youtubes tyranny, went bankrupt because people hate ads and also hate subscriptions, nor do they donate.
I could write pages about this, but I wish I could violently shake all the children (many who are now in their 40's) that so deeply feel entitled to free content on the internet, and scream "If you are not paying directly for the product, you have no right to complain about the product".
In reality the ad model is not going anywhere. Given the choice, people overwhelmingly chose to let the advertisers steer the ship if it means "free" entry.
tmtvl · 3h ago
I've got a Nebula lifetime membership and it's neat. I actually discovered channels through it (Not Just Bikes, WonderWhy, 12tone,...) which I hadn't heard of before. I also paid for YT Premium Lite in the past. The full YT Premium is too expensive for me, though.
But I feel a better example of paying for convenience is the Twitch subscriber system. They make it work in a way that others fail at by tying it in to various things like emotes and channel points and the general sense of supporting the creators. I know YT memberships exist, but I don't know how widely those are used and they just don't seem to get pushed as much.
viraptor · 3h ago
Twitch also lets people pay more than just the service price. So you'll they some people paying for themselves, but you'll also get whales paying for hundreds of other people. No other site I know of lets you do that really.
benhurmarcel · 4h ago
I pay for Nebula and still use Youtube a ton. Nebula is nice but it doesn’t have all channels I watch.
maplant · 3h ago
Vis a vis nebula, this is definitely a product issue. Dropout.tv seems to be extremely successful and has a similar value proposition
paxys · 9h ago
Video is impossible to break into because of how expensive it is. Even YouTube by all accounts is just breaking even. And that is with Google's entire infrastructure and advertising machinery behind it. A new entrant simply doesn't stand a chance.
carlosjobim · 7h ago
Hold on... A ton of broadcasters, production companies, and individuals have done it and are doing it.
YouTube have many competitors and some of them are enormous, such as Netflix and cable TV. Production companies are popping up all the time and are making some of the world's highest quality material. The same for individuals who are making videos.
Or do you mean that YouTube needs a competitor that does exactly the same thing as YouTube?
paxys · 6h ago
All of them are based on the traditional media production model. The companies were all well established in the industry (minus Netflix) and the only change was to go from broadcast/cable/theater to streaming. YouTube pioneered user generated videos and independent content creators. Its only competitor is probably Twitch, but that itself is owned by Amazon and losing a ton of money.
carlosjobim · 5h ago
All of them have the technical infrastructure to host user uploaded videos, so it's not impossible to compete with YouTube.
Workaccount2 · 5h ago
No one does video even remotely close to the scale YT does it. YT has by far the deepest market penetration (close to 3 billion monthly users), and has by far the most hosted content, and critically, youtube adds over a half-million hours of video a day.
Essentially, youtube adds more video every single day than the entirety of every other streaming service offers combined.
Youtube is in it's own category, and it's unsurprising no else wants to touch it.
carlosjobim · 4h ago
Counted in number of hours watched, I'm pretty sure that Netflix, cable TV and satellite TV, can compete with YouTube.
But everybody has to start somewhere. Would it be impossible for Netflix to start adding for example 100 000 hours of user generated video per day?
giantrobot · 1h ago
Serving user generated content is very expensive in terms of infrastructure. More expensive in many ways than streaming studio generated content.
The scales of the two models are very different. Ingesting content is more complicated with user generated content because there's few guarantees about formats (encoding, color, file formats). Serving the content is also more complicated because it's not as friendly to edge caches as studio content. Part of the expense of YouTube is the long tail of content. Popular content might live in edge caches but YouTube serves up old unpopular stuff too.
Workaccount2 · 3h ago
Would it be practical and economical is the right question to ask.
Providers would be more than happy to sell Netflix the build out
9283409232 · 9h ago
Nebula just doesn't have a product I want. I don't care for early access to Youtube videos.
nyarlathotep_ · 21m ago
> Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services, i.e. how many people pay for paid personal e-mail services?
Probably not many. OTOH, I pay for Fastmail and NextDNS (both for at least 5 years at this point).
People give strange looks when I mention paying for e-mail, even people "in the know."
SAAS offerings for individuals don't have a lot of market share (streaming services aside). The exception might be iCloud/GMail harassing people about running out of storage, and people just eventually going "sure, here's 3 bucks a month."
1vuio0pswjnm7 · 1h ago
"There must be a way to turn everything into a paid service where you get what you paid for and have your lives enhanced instead of monetized by proxy."
Internet is a paid service.
When I first accessed the internet in the 1980s, the only paid "service" necessary to use it was internet service. There was not the plethora of VC-funded third parties trying to act as intermediaries. The term "internet" amongst younger generations usually means only www sites, maybe app "endpoints" and _nothing else_. This is such a waste of potential.
Today's internet is more useful than the 1980s internet. But I do not attribute that to third party intermediaries that only seek to profit from other peoples' use of it. I attribute the increased utility to technological improvements in hardware, including networking equipment. I do not attribute the increased utility to "improvements" in software, and certainly not the proliferation of software distributed for free as a Trojan Horse for those seeking to profit from data collection, surveillance and advertising services.
The idea of paying for what these intermediaries try to call "services" makes no sense to me. Certainly, paying these intermediaries will not prevent them from data collection and surveillance for commercial purposes. (There are already examples.) It only subsidises this activity. Perhaps people believe these intermediaries engage in data collection, surveillance and ad services because "no one will pay for their software" instead of considering that they do so because they can, because there are few laws to prevent them. It was unregulated activity and is stilll grossly underregulated activity. It is more profitable than software licensing.
doix · 9h ago
I remember WhatsApp costing money, 1$ per year or per lifetime or something. I paid for it, I think it was a WinRar situation though, where deleting and reinstalling the app gave it to you for free or something.
I'm guessing most people didn't pay though, since they scraped the fee (even before FB bought them). I guess it was just too little money to be worth the effort.
RestlessMind · 21m ago
I was on Android back then and never paid for Whatsapp. Neither did any of my family or friends who used Android phones back in 2012-13
roryirvine · 7h ago
Other way round. Facebook bought them in 2014, and they dropped the fee in early 2016.
The fee wasn't enforced in many developing countries, and some users elsewhere will have been jumping through the delete-and-reinstall hoops (which was painful because it lost chat history) to avoid paying.
But with 1bn active users at the time the fee was dropped, it would still have been bringing in more than enough revenue to have sustained Whatsapp as an independent business if they had chosen not to sell to FB.
A_Duck · 9h ago
Yep I paid for Whatsapp, I've even dug out the receipt email. I want my £0.79 back!
Ekaros · 9h ago
Three years of WhatsApp service for phone just 2,67$... In 2015...
So I think I got that...
mschuster91 · 9h ago
Pre acquisition Whatsapp had 450M users. Even accounting for half the revenue of 1$ going away for payment fees (30%) and taxes (20%), that would still have been a nice cushy 200 million $ a year in almost pure profit - WA had 55 (!) employees at acquisition and 550 servers [1].
That's nothing at this scale of users and speaks volumes for the ingenuity of their staff.
The only ones driving even leaner than that are StackOverflow with just nine servers [2].
That fee wasn't really enforced. I was in India at the time and no one paid because no one had credit cards tied to their account. Everyone still used WhatsApp just fine.
WhyNotHugo · 3h ago
I pay a third party to host my email, and wouldn’t mind paying an honest service provider to host something like an XMPP service.
I wouldn’t pay Meta or similar companies for messaging services. And especially not for siloed messaging networks.
Xenoamorphous · 3h ago
HN crowd has never been representative in this regard.
Sure, it’s easy to get some 20 or 30-something year old with a cushy 6 figure salary to pay 20 USD or similar per month for some digital service (esp. when they are building some digital service themselves, so they know what it entails). For someone strugling to make ends meet, there’s many higher priority things than some digital service when there’s free alternatives, let alone email.
And your privacy concerns? In my experience, absolutely non-existent in the real world. Actually I only ever hear about them in HN, not even my software development coworkers. Just the other day there was some raffle where there was some weekend trip to somewhere as a prize, but you had to give all your personal details, there was a big queue, they would’ve given their blood type details (if not literally a few ccs of their blood) and told them all about their kinkiest fantasy if they’d asked for it. Literally, I’m not joking.
blitzar · 10h ago
> Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services
Rounded to the nearest meaningful number - 0%
mrtksn · 10h ago
I don't know, I expect it to be at least %3 as this is the general conversion rate for "free" users AFAIK.
There must be some some number that makes it viable to have free users and paid users. For games, the free users are usually those who provide the "content".
People usually demonize freemium games but IMHO its much more benign than extracting huge sums by artificially making it worse and sell attention.
blitzar · 9h ago
Most of those are tricked into it by manipulative UI or nearly impossible to cancel trials or forgotten monthly subscriptions.
mrtksn · 9h ago
How is it possible to have impossible to cancel trails? On AppStore it's in your account and takes 2 taps to cancel regardless of what the developer does.
Are you talking for direct, by credit card payments that somehow you can't cancel? Can you explain a bit?
blitzar · 9h ago
The abuse was so rampant that even the US has had to legislate. US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) introduced a new regulation, known as the “click to cancel” rule.
As for the darkest of dark patterns - give Adobe some money and see what happens.
mrtksn · 9h ago
Right, my rule of thumb is to stick with AppStore and when that's not an option use a Virtual card that I can just abandon if I don't want to use the service.
esrauch · 3h ago
Play Store also does this now and it's a fundamentally radical departure from the era where if you give the company your card info directly theres a high chance you aren't going to be able to get out of it without paying at least some amount more than you should.
Think gyms where you refuse to cancel even when you are physically there in person with someone to yell at and imagine trying to do the same online where there's not a phone number, or a phone number with a 1 hour wait and a CSR paid based on if they can successfully not give you what you want
1oooqooq · 9h ago
you're being too generous, as if people were on whatsbook because of a value they get.
they are just there for the captive network effect, which will take a hit the second or becomes a freemium or ad ridden service.
xp84 · 8h ago
Yeah, nobody uses Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or Google anymore now that they’re “ad-ridden”
1oooqooq · 1h ago
none of those are blasting "encryption! only you can read your messages" as their main message and marketing.
those are literal public forums people go to expose themselves. you don't have a very good point.
xp84 · 6m ago
Whatsapp is messaging-focused, but I'm willing to bet the quotation you just gave is not even 10% of the reason people choose to use it.
If I understand it correctly, people use it mainly because MMS was a dumpster fire and WA was the first platform which got critical mass in most countries, which it achieved by being both pretty good overall and by being cross-platform.
The encryption is a nice bonus that everybody likes, but you can't prove that is a primary or even major reason why plumbers in India, tour guides in Dubai, and school parent groups in the US all choose to communicate with it, personally and professionally. If anything, I feel like Signal must have by now poached a good number of the people whose main concern is "How encrypted is it?"
Also, Gmail is not a public forum and people don't mind that it's 'ad-ridden' either.
1oooqooq · 10h ago
it's probably under 0% even including the 2% error margin.
blitzar · 9h ago
Rounding up
temporallobe · 21m ago
I would be fine with the consumption model as long as it’s reasonable, but I honestly believe that streaming services hate this idea because it’s not as profitable as the ad model. In fact I am becoming more and more frustrated with services that I am paying for which show me ads even for “ad-free” experiences. For example, I pay for the highest tier of ad-free Hulu and Disney+ but Hulu somehow carves out exceptions for so-called non-Hulu content. So during some of those shows, you will see very frequent, very repetitive ads and it is quite obnoxious. There is literally not even an option to pay for a higher level of ad-free experience (I would!) because I guess they REALLY want to sell me Wegovy and SNHU and whatever other nonsense. The interruptions have gotten so obnoxious that I have lost interest. The only other option is to simply buy the episodes I am interested in. Or stop watching streaming content altogether.
GrantMoyer · 1h ago
The problem with this is that once enough people are paying for an ad-free subscription, services reintroduce ads to the paid subscription, sometimes alongside the introduction of a new more expensive ad-free subscriotion.
barnabee · 9h ago
I’d love to know the expected ad revenue per user for makers of apps like WhatsApp, Instagram.
I’m pretty convinced I’d pay 10x or more than that amount for a completely ad free version but I can’t be sure.
xp84 · 8h ago
Don’t underestimate how expensive ads are and thus how much money they can bring in. Marco Arment, the developer of Overcast podcast player, has made remarks in the past about how the ad-supported version is completely viable and may actually make him more money per user than the price of his paid option. In his case, he runs his own contextual ad system. Obviously Meta is in a completely different league in terms of sophistication, meaning they are probably able to sell more targeted ads which means more money, and they also have the luxury of not having to pay any middlemen since they own their own ad infrastructure as well.
Part of me thinks the reason why they don’t offer that paid ad-free version of Facebook (which they built to try and appease the EU regulators) in the US is because their ARPU is so high that people would laugh at the price “Facebook/IG Premium” would have to cost.
Also, don’t forget that at least for now, paid subscriptions to social media apps would need to pay a 30% rent to the platform owner duopoly. This means that the price it would be it would cost would need to be 42% above than its ad ARPU just to break even.
tensor · 1h ago
If Instragram had a reasonable paid tier, like $5 a month, I'd do that in a hearbeat. I'd also use instragram 1000x more. Because it's ads only in north america, I use it the minimum I need to for networking purposes.
detaro · 9h ago
I'm not sure if the number was for Facebook specifically or all Meta apps, but they did quote a number of around $70 revenue per year per US user a while ago. (with (much) lower numbers in other parts of the world)
disgruntledphd2 · 8h ago
These numbers are actually kinda interesting, in that they're based on user location, not advertiser. So basically all global companies target the US first because it's a big market with consistent regulations and mostly one language (compare to the EU where you'd need English/German/French/Spanish/Polish and still would miss a lot).
So, those numbers reflect a capital inflow to the US market rather than (as many people think) absurdly high conversion US users.
Meta stopped reporting user numbers/CPMs by geography after the market freaked out when user growth plateaued in the US (because they'd acquired basically everyone).
detaro · 7h ago
> So, those numbers reflect a capital inflow to the US market rather than (as many people think) absurdly high conversion US users.
But the capital inflow is also because there is a lot of consumer spending in the US to convert.
barnabee · 8h ago
That’s interesting, thanks
owebmaster · 9h ago
You would not, because 90% of the years wouldn't pay and you wouldn't also to have nobody to talk to after everybody moves to the next chat app
barnabee · 8h ago
Why would users who can continue to receive exactly the same experience as today leave because some other users can opt to pay to go ad-free?
irjustin · 9h ago
This is only true if they introduce them. i.e. FB doesn't have a paid service, but obviously Youtube does.
The problem is Whatsapp is a closed ecosystem so unlike email we can't just buy a provider.
And I do pay for youtube. The experience is well worth it and I'm thankful I can afford it (it's not a lot but many can't).
xp84 · 8h ago
“Can’t” is relative. I suspect there are a lot of people who pay for at least one streaming service that isn’t YouTube, but spend more hours watching YouTube in a month than they do watching that service.
And of course there’s also the age-old comparison that if someone goes to Starbucks more than twice in a month, they probably spend more there than you would on YouTube Premium, and does that provide the person with as much value as YouTube does?
In my opinion, it’s rarely about “can’t” when we’re talking about 12 bucks a month or whatever. It’s about the psychology: when a free tier exists, people reframe it in their heads that paying for that thing is an extravagance. Relatedly, removing the free tier altogether also has dangerous effects, as people immediately jump to “I can’t believe you’re taking away the free thing I used to have” outrage, while nobody complains about not having free access to say, HBO.
A_Duck · 9h ago
The trouble with charging people is you have to charge everybody the same[1], so you're leaving money on the table with wealthy users, and pricing out poorer users
Ads mean each user 'pays' you according to their spending power
Kinda socialist when you think about it! From each according from his ability...
[1] Obviously companies try to get around this with price discrimination, but it's hard especially for a network effect platform
xp84 · 8h ago
That is the absolute beauty of the targeted ad situation, isn’t it: you can generate leads for mortgages or expensive enterprise SaaS services, that are happy to pay super high acquisition costs, maximizing revenue from your rich users, and with the same ad inventory, maximize the revenue from your poor users by advertising App Store casino games for children, payday loans, etc. You can see why Meta doesn’t bother offering a paid service here.
carlosjobim · 9h ago
Most people go absolutely mentally deranged by a simple magical incantation. The powerful incantation or spell consists of only one word: "Free". That word will make people loose their mind and their soul.
It will make people accept anything and everything that they would never otherwise accept. They will line up for hours, they will accept hostile and toxic messages being screamed into their faces, they will humiliate themselves, they will spend sleepless nights, they will willingly enslave themselves, they will wither away in sickness, they will murder millions in the most cruel way imaginable.
All for "free".
Societies in our history were not arranged in the same way around money, because probably there was some knowledge of the two-sided curse of avarice and stinginess. I'm talking about medieval and post-medieval society, where most people didn't use or have money in their everyday life. Instead they had duties.
UnreachableCode · 5h ago
But Signal is free. And ad-free
carlosjobim · 3h ago
Sure, it's a rare case of a project which is sponsored and paid for by a billionaire. I wish there were more such projects, but you can't base an economy on charity from billionaires.
tumsfestival · 1h ago
Well, that is what happens when everything costs money and most people are just trying to get by on a daily basis, making cuts everywhere just to pay their bills, not everyone has a nice disposable income to throw away at apps. That people prefer ads over paying yet another subscription is a symptom of unchecked capitalism and the inequality that comes with it.
basisword · 3h ago
>> Does anybody have stats on how many people are O.K. paying for their core services
Some of us actually paid for WhatsApp! I think it was about $1 a year when it launched. At the time it was providing significant value, especially in areas where cross-border communication was common.
I'm sure $1 isn't enough to cover costs anymore but someone could make a nice living charging $5-10 a month for something similar. The problem is people will always sell out to investors and fuck over their users. It's inevitable.
leokennis · 10h ago
At least in The Netherlands, WhatsApp could show a 60 second unskippable modal ad video on every launch, and still get away with it due to network effects.
If you’re not on WhatsApp, no updates or news from your kids school, your sports team, your family, your car dealership etc. for you.
AlecSchueler · 9h ago
Signal seems to be booming right now in the Netherlands. I've been using it for years and never managed to grow my contact list beyond single digits, being a few friends in tech and a few who were very privacy conscious. All of those people were also available on WhatsApp and we'd often forget and message one another there.
But since January the trust in Meta has not only plummeted but it's become a mainstream enough talking point that I now receive invites to join Signal groups from--for want of a better term--normal people. Two of the local parenting groups I'm on are on Signal and no one ever mentions it or questions it, it's just "here's the group link" and the expectation that everyone has it installed.
ghusto · 6h ago
In the Netherlands, was trying to promote Signal.
I switched phones and lost all my history. Now I’m fairly careful with these things, and make backups, but even I wasn’t able to get it back. Couldn’t recommend it to anyone since.
There’s a line between being secure and being useful, and they’re slightly unbalanced in Signal.
jeroenhd · 1h ago
Had the same happen with WhatsApp. Turns out you get one chance to get the local file backup right or you're screwed.
Funes- · 6h ago
You should've made sure of how Signal works with regards to chat history before you removed the app from the old phone.
vinay427 · 9m ago
Message history still can’t be backed up on iOS, and also can’t be moved between Android and iOS in either direction AFAIK. There are far more gaps here than just imperfect users, which is often a UX problem as others have noted.
nsagent · 2h ago
I have Signal on my phone and laptop. For some reason my laptop desynced from the phone, so my chat history now has a missing block of message history (that exists on the phone). I did nothing obvious to cause that desync. My guess is that my phone updated the Signal app, and I didn't update it on the laptop in lockstep. That's not a great UX, especially since there is no notification that this might happen.
tomsmeding · 1h ago
Desync happens simply after a month of not using the PC client. Yes, it's that short.
egypturnash · 3h ago
"the iphone 4's antenna isn't a bad design, you're just holding it wrong" - steve jobs
jobigoud · 3h ago
To be fair Whatsapp works the same, if you are not careful when changing phone you will lose your history. That's because they don't actually store your messages on their servers, they are just synchronized between devices.
philipwhiuk · 2h ago
How does it handle phone theft?
dakial1 · 3h ago
Something seems to have happened in NL in March that generated some demand for it, but it seems to have vanished now:
Your link shows a peak at the time you mention but the interest in subsequent months has been around 4 times higher than it was prior to the inauguration, so it seems inaccurate or even misleading to say that demand has "vanished."
jonplackett · 3h ago
It’s not like there’s no alternatives.
But tbh if they keep the ads out of messages I don’t see it an affecting people much.
nand_gate · 2h ago
Been tempting to spin up a competitor but the business/compliance side seems nightmarish whilst the actual tech aspects are trivial on modern hardware.
wtmt · 6h ago
It’s similar in India. Even many businesses only use WhatsApp for orders and communications with customers. Heck, even the police use it to communicate between their people and with complainants/victims. Politicians use it between their party people and to send messages to the public. The average person on the street no longer knows what an SMS is or how to use it.
But I manage without WhatsApp (it’s also a privileged position to do so). Not having WhatsApp also helps avoid seeing all the junk and misinformation that people forward on it without any thought. There’s actually a name for this in India: “WhatsApp University”, which is a derogatory term for how people believe anything they read on WhatsApp and share it around without any analysis or thought or skepticism whatsoever.
robertlagrant · 9h ago
> When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, the messaging app had a clear focus. No ads, no games and no gimmicks.
This sort of analysis is very surface-level I think. My impression is WhatsApp offered that by running on VC money and had no plan to run an actual business. That's not a question of focus. It's an unsustainable, please monetise me later land grab.
rchaud · 1h ago
Have you considered that you may be making the surface-level analysis? I paid $3 for Whatsapp in 2010 on the Blackberry app store. They had a staff of ~20 people handling messages across almost 200 countries.It became the defacto global messaging app because it was available on every single platform, not just the Apple/Google duopoly VCs cared about.
ndriscoll · 7h ago
How was it unsustainable? As far as I know they were simply competent. They charged $1/year, so had ~half a billion in revenue, right? They probably could've bumped that to $2-$5/year with similar uptake. And they ran it with ~500 servers and 50 employees 12 years ago, so could probably do the same with ~50 or fewer servers today.
YetAnotherNick · 3h ago
Whatsapp revenue was $10M and the cost of revenue was $52M, with total net loss of $138M/yr just before facebook acquisition.
they also never required many of their users to pay. whatsapp allegedly cost $1 a year, and I never paid a dime despite using it for years.
robertlagrant · 7h ago
They're doing a lot more now, though. Voice notes; multi-way video and audio calls; e2ee. And they barely even charged $1/year. I never paid for it.
like_any_other · 1h ago
It's called bait-and-switch - lure users in away from (possibly FOSS, e.g. Matrix) competitors, and when you have enough network effects that switching becomes hard, spring the trap.
Zuck Says Ads Aren’t The Way To Monetize Messaging, WhatsApp Will Prioritize Growth Not Subscriptions
"Monetization was the big topic on today’s analyst call after Facebook announced it acquired WhatsApp for a jaw-dropping total of $19 billion. That’s $4 billion in cash and $12 billion in stock, and it reserved $3 billion in restricted stock units to retain the startup’s employees. But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, CFO David Ebersman, and WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum all said that won’t be a priority for the next few years. And when the time does come to monetize aggressively, it won’t be through ads"
BiggerChungus · 7h ago
Respectfully, clearly you aren't familiar with Jan and Brian's history of public statements.
Even for years after they were acquired by Meta, Jan refused to allow advertising and kept pushing the $1 dollar per user subscription fee. Sheryl nixed it b/c it was "not scalable."
VC's may have the mindset that the founders will eventually acquiesce to ads, but also they didn't really care b/c all they wanted was an exit, which they got.
The founders, however, were never interested in an ad business and hold that POV to this day.
robertlagrant · 7h ago
> The founders, however, were never interested in an ad business and hold that POV to this day.
Fair enough, but the founders don't necessarily make these decisions. I wasn't particularly referring to them. If they got VC money (I don't know if they did or not) then the VCs must've had something in mind to get a decent return on their risk.
Youtube was the same. Both are products that people really want to use.
robertlagrant · 9h ago
I agree, although that's too vague. YouTube has a different appeal. But my point is more that I wouldn't say YouTube got ads because it stopped having a focus on not having ads. It needs to pay for itself.
timeon · 9h ago
Also Instagram and others. It was about capturing and selling community.
illiac786 · 5h ago
> In-app ads are a significant change from WhatsApp’s original philosophy. Jan Koum and Brian Acton, who founded WhatsApp in 2009, were committed to building a simple and quick way for friends and family to communicate with end-to-end encryption
End-to-end encryption was added by Meta, they reused (part of) the Signal app code for this.
This was a big topic for years, I am surprised by this oversight.
kovariantenkak · 3h ago
Fun fact: For the first few years WhatsApp didn't have any encryption whatsoever. It took public pressure for them to even add TLS.
A massive oversight on the authors part and completely missing the point of early WhatsApp as first status update application and then SMS replacement.
openplatypus · 2h ago
I could easily pay for WhatsApp if it wasnt Facebook/Meta.
With it being Meta I can be sure I will pay and still have my data and privacy violated.
ommz · 9h ago
Ah... There's a pattern here. Soon enough, just like with Facebook pages eons ago, they will nerf the reach of WhatsApp channels then prod channel owners to pay for more eyeballs.
It should be a law of nature that whatever Meta/Facebook acquires will surely be ad-riddled & 'spyware' infested regardless of the "we won't" promises they swear to abide by.
perks_12 · 9h ago
WhatsApp has S-tier status here in Germany. If I had access to a proper API I would pay them per message, without them needing to make their UX worse. If anything, if I had to pay per message, I'd be incentivized not to send too many messages, keeping the distractions for the user at a minimum.
ASalazarMX · 9h ago
This is why they've been pretty draconian in banning users who work around the official apps and limits. Otherwise, to force their ads they would have to oust third-parties the way Reddit did.
> If anything, if I had to pay per message, I'd be incentivized not to send too many messages
Sounds like SMS.
Kwpolska · 3h ago
Except not limited to 160 characters (70 if you want Unicode) and with rich media capabilities.
stonogo · 3h ago
So... MMS, then?
jeroenhd · 1h ago
MMS has terrible limitations, in both file size and media resolution.
RCS has replaced MMS as a protocol back in 2008 and it's only now gaining traction. Many carriers have shut down their RCS infrastructure half a decade ago, though, so they're not exactly jumping on the chance to turn it back on.
djtango · 2h ago
Why did MMS feel so janky back in the day?
Was it a client thing or a protocol thing?
Whatsapp felt so responsive back in the day. I'd be pinging my family in real time halfway across the globe on mobile in 2009. For Free. That was a killer app...
Why did MMS fail where Whatsapp succeeded?
christina97 · 9h ago
There’s something particularly paternalistic about this statement from the PM: “Your personal messages, calls and statuses, they will remain end-to-end encrypted”.
rchaud · 1h ago
US TV channels are inundated with Whatsapp ads claiming the same. Not surprising considering that it's been considered the "foreigners" messaging app for a long time, and the US government is now doing its very best to make them feel completely unwelcome.
blitzar · 9h ago
Any man who must say, "I am the King", is no true king.
Any tech company who must say, "we don't harvest your information", is a tech company that harvests your information.
gruez · 3h ago
Signal also claims the same:
> We can't read your messages or listen to your calls, and no one else can either.
Should we be suspicious of Signal as well?
selfhoster11 · 2h ago
Signal isn't backed by a global data gathering conglomerate, so no.
gruez · 2h ago
You're right, they're funded by something far more sinister - the US government.
More to the point, I thought the principle was "Any man who must say, "I am the King", is no true king."? That seems to leave no room for hedging, like only distrusting "global data gathering conglomerate" or whatever. If you're have to do a holistic assessment of an organization's governance structure and incentives, you're basically admitting that witty one-liners like the above are pointless, which was my point.
Krasnol · 2h ago
Sure you should be suspicious. You should always be suspicious. Especially if it's free. And you can do something to calm your suspicions. Like checking out Signlas Open Source code.
gruez · 1h ago
>Like checking out Signlas Open Source code.
What's preventing them from serving a backdoored version? xz was open source as well, that didn't stop the backdoor. There might be reproducible builds on android, but you can't even inspect the executable on iOS without jailbreaking.
cherryteastain · 1h ago
You can instead install a FOSS fork of Signal like Molly [1] built by F-Droid directly from the source code
Every time I read such a statment I mentally add "for now" at the end.
bondarchuk · 3h ago
Looks like it's (for now) only in the "Updates" tab..
snapcaster · 10h ago
Surprised it took them this long
toast0 · 9h ago
They were working on it in 2019 when I left, I thought it was tested in one country after that and then it got shelved. IIRC, it needed a ToS change and there was too much pushback.
I had been voluntold to be on the ads team, because I had sent a list of things that needed to be done to make ads doable and not terrible. Of course, none of my ideas were deemed feasible at the time, including figuring our the ToS stuff, because no use building a product you can't launch and ToS changes aren't easy.
blitzar · 9h ago
> things that needed to be done to make ads doable and not terrible ... none of my ideas were deemed feasible at the time
Don't sell yourself short ... they did all the things to make ads doable it was just not feasible to make them not terrible.
toast0 · 9h ago
I mean, they didn't, at least at the time, because they couldn't launch it.
In my mind, early focus on ToS could have possibly gotten the change more palletable/directed the project towards more palletable choices or perhaps more likely gotten to the cancellation decision faster and people could work on different things.
1oooqooq · 10h ago
they got so lucky with whatsbook taking over entire countries, they were swimming in money just selling support channels to gov and big companies.
literal chat dialog tree with 4 options that is not connected to anything for around 250k/year.
vachina · 9h ago
If ads are not unblockable (via DNS), then it’s time for Signal.
Funes- · 6h ago
With all the morally reprovable shit they've pulled on their users, it's always been time for Signal.
charles_f · 9h ago
Whatsapp used to be paying (and pretty cheap) before it was bought out, and I was happy to pay for it. I'd much rather have that than starting to get ads. They're going to be hidden in a feature no-one uses, they're not going to use private data, but given Facebook's invasive behavior, how true is it and how long will it last?
rootnod3 · 9h ago
I think that kind of business model will screw them. Line has a more sensible one. For example if a business wants to message all its followers, they can only do so twice a month unless they start paying. So customers get an ad-free experience and can only receive ad messages from companies or accounts they follow.
davweb · 7h ago
Meta are already monetising business usage of WhatsApp in this way[1].
Didn't Facebook promise the WhatsApp guys, or its users, that it will "never" show ads in that app, as a condition of buying it?
saintfire · 1h ago
They didn't pinky promise, though.
huqedato · 3h ago
Great. It's then time to drop it and move on.
andrepd · 10h ago
Would be nice if these kinds of articles would at least take a paragraph to plug some alternatives, such as Signal.
nsagent · 2h ago
I used to use Signal exclusively rather than Whatsapp, but I've had lots of issues sending media. This has not been a problem with Whatsapp, so I've recently begun to use Whatsapp more. There are also issues with message history that I've encountered on Signal that don't exist on Whatsapp.
If Signal could address these concerns I'd be happy to move away from Whatsapp.
With this news I'll likely need to reassess my use of Whatsapp again.
cosmic_cheese · 37m ago
WhatsApp’s desktop app is also a good deal better. Signal is very mobile-centric which I’m sure makes sense for a lot of people, but I’m sitting in front of a real keyboard for most of my days and so it’s a nice when desktop clients are first-class citizens and not afterthoughts.
It’s frustrating that it’s basically only Telegram and WhatsApp that take desktop platforms seriously.
jahnu · 10h ago
Signal have a few things that make it a hard sell.
It's really hard to clean up media. You have to go into every single chat and from there go about deleting stuff. At least they finally added a "select all" option in there recently.
So the size of it just grows and grows and grows until it's using all the space on your phone. Not a good fit for non-technical types.
Secondly, no web view. There is the desktop app yes, which is flaky, slow and wants to update every day or two.
I just can't see average people putting up with those inconveniences and that's just a couple of them.
AlecSchueler · 9h ago
> So the size of it just grows and grows and grows until it's using all the space on your phone. Not a good fit for non-technical types.
To be fair I've met plenty of non-techie types whose phones were "full" of stuff from WhatsApp or photos that had already been backed up, because the idea they could clear their local storage would never cross their minds. I've seen people buy new phones instead of clearing their cache.
jahnu · 9h ago
Yes it's also a problem there but WhatsApp gives you the tools to fix the problem in minutes if not seconds, or ask your tech literate relative or friend to help and it only takes them the couple of minutes to clear it and maybe show you how. With Signal it can take hours of work so what happens is the non-techy person understands "oh this app filled my phone up I shouldn't use it".
MrDOS · 9h ago
I stopped recommending Signal to nontechnical folks due to the inability to back up messages on iOS. People are pretty protective of their message history, and having everything tied to a single device with no recourse for backups is a nonstarter.
The slightly longer version of the story is that my wife, travelling alone, had some trouble with an iPhone update (it hung for hours), and so she took it to the nearest Genius Bar; they eventually got the update to apply, but then did a factory reset “just to be safe”. Of course, everything except her Signal message history was restored from the automatic iCloud backups. She was devastated, and refuses to touch it now.
Please do not reply to say this was the fault of the Apple Store employee. It was, but at the same time, it also very much wasn't.
jahnu · 9h ago
Oh yes this too. How could I forget!
andrepd · 9h ago
It's very frustrating, I admit. Backups and archival are indeed a pet peeve of mine, as are the frequent redesigns (but that's just a "feature" virtually every single god-damn modern app).
What is the alternative though? A private chat app, mobile + desktop, syncing, with enough ease of setup and use for normies to adopt? I don't see it.
jahnu · 7h ago
I suppose the true alternative would be a standard open protocol that enables this cross platform.
laurent123456 · 10h ago
As always network effect will be the problem. I know plenty of people on WhatsApp and almost nobody on Signal
paxys · 9h ago
Network effects aren't a big deal when it comes to messaging. There was a time when people thought iPhone wouldn't be able to overcome Blackberry because everyone was on BBM. In the last couple decades we've seen people go from ICQ to AIM/Yahoo/MSN to Google Talk to Skype to Facebook Messenger to BBM to Whatsapp/iMessage/Instagram, with dozens of smaller options like Kik, Viber, Line, Signal, Telegram all hanging around. It doesn't take much to cause another shift in the space.
standardUser · 1h ago
That sounds nice, but in reality most of my extended friend group has migrated to WhatsApp over the last 10 years and is unlikely to change anytime soon. Interoperability would be nice (like we used to have) but that will never happen until Apple stops using their lack of interoperability as a way to ostracize young people and sell more phones.
AlexandrB · 9h ago
It's a problem but not insurmountable. Otherwise we'd all still be using ICQ/AIM/MSN Messenger/Skype/etc.
blitzar · 9h ago
We are off those because of multi messanger platforms made switching to the "hot new thing" very low friction. It was only once mobile came along that the playing field narrowed so much.
Current networks have way more lock in than back in the day.
stevage · 10h ago
I don't find there is much network effect for one on one messaging. I have to use a few different apps to talk to all my friends, it's not a big deal to switch to/from Signal or Whatsapp. With groups it's more effort.
tiluha · 9h ago
This does not match my experience in Germany. If somebody gives you their phone number it is just expected that you can reach them on WhatsApp and i have yet to meet anyone that doesn't use WhatsApp.
standardUser · 1h ago
That seems true throughout the most of the Western world, excluding the US. I have a big WhatsApp network, but that's by virtue of living in SF and NY. Without big immigrant/expat/world-traveler communities, I think most of the US just uses iMessage or regular text.
randerson · 9h ago
It's easy to have multiple chat apps in parallel though, each with their own network.
Ads will make more people Signal-curious, or even drive people back to text messages. The average person who switches will convince a non-zero number of their contacts to come with them. The shift will start gradually. Think of Skype, which at one point everyone I knew was on. That network didn't protect them from being replaced by competitors.
People are also increasingly worried about retaliation from the government for their supposedly free speech, which has already driven a few people I know to secure alternatives that aren't operated by Trump allies.
No comments yet
add-sub-mul-div · 9h ago
Discerning people will already seek out other options on their own, the vast majority won't. We know the pattern from the respective Reddit and Twitter enshittification phases.
bondarchuk · 3h ago
If I can only message with discerning people might as well not have any messaging app at all.
jraby3 · 10h ago
WhatsApp has long promoted itself as a safe alternative to apps like Telegram and Google’s Android messaging. Users flocked to the app globally, finding it a cheap and secure alternative to texting, particularly people in unstable political climates and authoritarian countries, since its messages cannot be easily intercepted without access to personal devices.
angry_octet · 10h ago
This reply screams LLM. Not really responding to the parent comment, nauseatingly anodyne in content. Not wrong, but not right. Will HN be overwhelmed with LLM trash?
gloxkiqcza · 9h ago
It’s a quote from the linked article.
add-sub-mul-div · 9h ago
With all the LLM enthusiasts here why would HN not be at the forefront of it?
emushack · 41m ago
And the enshitification continues...
Aerbil313 · 2h ago
Today is the day the notion of the 'internet is free, good and a convenience' is over for the global public. WhatsApp was the first ever primary convenience brought by the advent of the internet - it fulfilled a legitimate need all over the world by providing essentially free, limitless, boundless communication if you had few megabytes of internet in your mobile quota. It is to this day the #1 most used app for a good percentage of the population, only surpassed by social media. (Mostly because of the immortal network effects lingering from a decade ago.)
I was honestly expecting it, after recently seeing on a friend's phone that it already essentially turned to social media on Android. They can't yet push it on the higher income iPhone users (lest they switch to other messenger apps), but change is coming rather inevitably since it's nothing but untapped advertising dollars potential in the eyes of the behemoth that is Meta.
I don't think there's a sustainable solution here except to self-host a Matrix server for family and friends if you have the time, money and technical expertise.
skeeter2020 · 1h ago
>> WhatsApp was the first ever primary convenience brought by the advent of the internet
Unique but I believe fundamentally incorrect take on the Internet...
nojvek · 6h ago
WhatsApp promise to users by it's founders.
“No ads! No games! No gimmicks!”
I wonder how the early founders feel about what Whatsapp has become with random junk and gimmicks in the UI.
baggachipz · 3h ago
I'm sure their tears are rolling down the mountains of cash they sit upon.
9283409232 · 9h ago
One thing I don't hear people is ads used as tracking tools. The Facebook pixel is huge for not just tracking for digital advertisements but tracking across the web for surveillance. With ads in WhatsApp, you could in theory use advertisements for identity resolution.
deafpolygon · 9h ago
If that’s the case, I’ll just switch to Apple Messages since all 3 people in the world that I talk to have those available.
lawgimenez · 9h ago
This post was no.5 on hacker news, minutes later I’m surprised it is now somewhere around 67.
vips7L · 9h ago
Just another reason iMessage is coming out on top.
standardUser · 1h ago
iMessage is successful because it is designed to reward other iMessage users and punish those who dare not use an iPhone. It's social engineering in the pursuit of profit by the overwhelming market leader (in the US) and it's working really, really well.
tacker2000 · 1h ago
imessage is irrelevant outside of the US.
vips7L · 22m ago
That literally means nothing when it comes to determining which is the better platform.
nottorp · 9h ago
I remember paying 0.99 for ... something ... before Whatsapp was acquired by Facebook.
Wouldn't mind doing it again.
Unfortunately now they're owned by a Silicon Valley company so I guess 0.99 is too little for them, they'll charge the price of a SV latte... how much is that? 59.99? 99.99?
gear54rus · 9h ago
Does anyone know what's the state of the art way for cutting crap out of android apps? In the same way adblock cuts crap out of web pages?
I assume one would need a Java disassembler at least. On desktop, something like recaf works and allows changing things in classes without the full recompilation.
Is there something like this for android?
hiccuphippo · 9h ago
DNS blocking with tools like DNSNet get you halfway there without tampering with the apps. It installs itself like a VPN and filters dns requests to ad domains using lists from the same sources as the adblockers.
I say halfway because some apps have a fallback, built-in, ad when it can't reach the server, other serve the ads from their own servers so no way to block them. Most only leave a blank space.
yehoshuapw · 8h ago
also adaway, which does the same or can be used in root mode to edit the hosts file.
I use the hosts file from there, and edit it manually via "adb root" (lineageos. root only via adb)
paxys · 9h ago
More than halfway I'd say. It blocks everything from third party ad networks, which is what 90%+ of websites and apps use.
1oooqooq · 10h ago
YES!
finally people will start to move out of whatsbook!
....i hope
arch_deluxe · 2h ago
This seems like a good time to mention that FreeFollow.org is looking for private beta testers for our app that combines the pub/sub model and slick UX of social media (posts, comments, following) with the economic model of webhosting (pay to host a group, not to participate in them) and the E2EE design of 1Password (but using OPAQUE which is actually the protocol used by WhatsApp, rather than SRP).
Our initial use case -- why we're building this -- is parents who are currently using text groups in Apple Messages or WhatsApp to share photos/videos of their kiddos with friends/family and want something less interruptive and more casual, but for whom social media is so toxic and untrusted as to be a non-starter.
I just don't want to believe that our services have to be paid for through proxy by giving huge cut to 3rd parties. The quality goes down both as UX and as core content, our attention span is destroyed, our privacy is violated and our political power is being stolen as content gets curated by those who extract money by giving us the "free" services.
It's simply very inefficient. IMHO we should go back to pay for what you use, this can't go on forever. There must be way to turn everything into a paid service where you get what you paid for and have your lives enhanced instead of monetized by proxy.
I, as the “computer guy”, had friends and family asking how to pirate it. This is coming from SMS costing €0.25 per message (text only!) and also coming from people who would gladly pay €3 for a Coke at a bar that they’d piss down the toilet an hour later. It didn’t matter if it only took 3 or 4 messages to make Whatsapp pay off for itself, as they were sending dozens if not hundreds of messages per day, either images, videos and whatnot (MMSs were much more expensive).
At that moment I realised many (most?) people would never pay for software. Either because it’s not something physical or because they’re stuck in the pre-Internet (or maybe music) mentality where copying something is not “stealing” as it’s digital data (but they don’t realise running Whatsapp servers, bandwidth etc cost very real money). And I guess this is why some of the biggest digital services are ad-funded.
In contrast, literally never someone has voiced privacy concerns, they simply find ads annoying and they’ve asked for a way to get rid of them (without paying, of course).
I should say, I’m from one of the European countries with the highest levels of piracy.
I see this and not see this.
See this = friend wants to check out app but it costs $1-$3. I'm like, that's less than a coffee or a candy bar that you consume disposably. Why not just try it and if it's sucks throw it away, the same way you might with a new food item? That argument doesn't work on them for some reason.
not see = Steam
I mostly share your conclusion, but I think there is a specific twist: most people will pay for on the spot transactions.
We see it in spades for games: in-app purchases and season passes have a lower barrier of acceptance. I assume buying stones to unlock a character must be thought at the same level as buying coffee, as just a one-time purchase that doesn't require further calculations.
the urge to buy goes down if the subscription is cheap enough ($.99 songs versus $12 a spotify subsscription) but having been through my fair share of attempting contract cancellations this isn't surprising.
Now the credit card company knows what service I am buying; I would get endless marketing emails from the service for buying additional things; my info as a person willing to pay for such a service would get sold to other companies; my credit card info would get leaked/stolen, ...
If the whole experience was literally as simple as handing someone a $1 bill, I promise I would pay for many many internet services.
But then to book directly and get the "guaranteed cheapest!" price, I have to sort through even more options than on an aggregator, I have to create an account, and now I'm getting spammed from ANOTHER entity I never plan to do business with again. At least with the aggregators I have one company whose privacy settings I've already dealt with.
I don't know. Paying for streaming services seems very natural nowadays.
It's the friction of paying for something at all. There is no free sandwich, so people don't generally expect it, on the other hand there's plenty of free software.
I think it's just if you're empire building - and Zuck is insanely good at this, one of the best - then it'll never be optimal to charge vs. grow massively and then monetize the larger attention base.
Zuck is also in a trench warfare competition with other social media players, it's far from a monopoly. He's historically been more inclined to do things that were worse for growth, but better for users when they had more of a dominant position - but he can't do that anymore.
Somewhat relatedly Apple really missed an opportunity with iMessage. Had they timed it right they could have had a dominant cross platform chat. Instead they're going to be stuck with the modern equivalent of BBM while Zuck and Meta erase their only remaining stronghold in the US as iPhone users continue to move to WhatsApp.
> Somewhat relatedly Apple really missed an opportunity with iMessage. Had they timed it right they could have had a dominant cross platform chat.
Google also had the opportunity to do this. Around the same time iMessage launched, Google made Hangouts the default SMS app on Android with a similar capability to upgrade to Internet-based messaging when all parties to a conversation had it. Hangouts was cross-platform. Rumor has it carriers whined and Google caved.
I'm kind of glad Google doesn't have a dominant messaging service, but it's only true due to their own lack of commitment.
Whereas Whatsapp was simple - only phone numbers to sign up, only text and images, only mobile phones. That simplicity meant my parents could onboard smoothly and operate it without having to navigate a maze of UX. I literally saw Whatsapp winning in real time vs Hangouts and other alternatives.
I used Hangouts for a while and had a bunch of contacts on it when it was Android's default SMS app. Many of them were not particularly technical, including one of my parents whom I don't recall telling to use it. If you were using an Android phone, you were probably already logged in to a Google account. iPhone users had to work a little harder for it (install the app and remember the password to the Gmail account they probably already had).
I don't recall the UX on the mobile client having extra complexity over other messaging apps if I didn't go digging in the settings, but it's been a while.
There are many people I run across who bypassed the whole Gmail and Google Workspace ecosystems and have rolled along merrily with me.com and other email providers.
It's not a given that users will have bothered to register for a Google account unless they grew up in the Bay Area after a certain time period.
Wind back the clock to when Google tried to roll out Hangouts and the Gmail penetration rate was even lower among the non-Android users out there.
(1) https://www.pipersandler.com/teens
There's no way they actually earned $500M/year. Even if Whatsapp had 100 employees making $200k/year on average, that's $20M on salaries. Add an another very generous $80M on infra/admin etc costs and they'd have been making $400M profit. With that much profit achieved within such a short period, in the QE funny money era they could have IPO'd at $50-100 billion easily.
Went to South Africa on vacation last year. United lost our luggage on the first leg of the trip, which then became South African Airways responsibility to sort out because they handled our final leg.
I communicated directly with the SAA baggage agent over WhatsApp. Then communicated over WhatsApp with the courier delivering our bags . Best customer service ever.
This would not be true most places outside of the USA and maybe Canada. In a few countries/regions it might be a different third-party messaging app.
I think the other factor is a bit of anchoring. I know this impacts me anyways. If there is a "free" alternative, then that's where I'm anchored at. I can watch youtube for free so paying for it seems like a bad deal. Where as there is no free alternative to Coke that still gets your Coke (as opposed to say water).
Flight comparators don't show "avaliable legroom" in their metrics.
As far as I know some companies charge more for seats near entrances where there's more space, so people are willing to pay more.
In my anecdotal experience, the people complaining about leg room are precisely those who are not paying for additional leg room. (Similar to how people who compare modern air travel with service in the 1960s aren't purchasing the inflation-adjusted equivalent ticket, which would almost always be a lay-flat seat today if not Wheels Up.)
How to you qualify the comfort of a seat with 20cm of legroom vs 30cm? Until we have a quality metric for flights that's also a single number we can't.
Strangely, some of my colleagues have 'paid' (work's money, their time) extra to avoid Ryanair, when Ryanair has the only direct connection. This I find strange.
Given the choice, I've long paid a little more if it means an Airbus plane, as I think the cabin is quieter. However, that's rarely shown on flight booking sites.
To be fair, that was in era when pirating was such a normal thing. Everybody at least knew about it. Cheap pirated DVD's were super common (I received them as gifts even) and everyone knew someone selling them. With people accustomed to paying for Netflix, music streaming, Office 365, etc. maybe a subscription version of WhatsApp would be more palatable. The problem is nobody will pay as long as the tech behemoths are offering the same thing for free.
I cannot overstate how unexpected this was and is to me, we talk about people in their mid-twenties with jobs - maybe (video) streaming / subscriptions services actually overplayed their hand in the current economic climate.
Doesn't make me super optimistic in this regard.
[1] even if most of it is void in my jurisdiction anyway
Interestingly, WhatsApp put up paid plans to slow down user acquisition [0].
On Androids, in some countries, WhatsApp continued to work even if you didn't pay the $1/year fee.
[0] https://youtu.be/8-pJa11YvCs?t=952
The one specific example of this that made me think so is the Youtube Premium situation. So many people in the “a fee instead of ads” crowd consumes YT for hours a day, but so far I’ve only met one person (not counting myself) who actually pays for YT Premium.
And yes, a major chunk of the people I talked about this with were FAANG engineers, so it isn’t like they cannot afford it. But it felt like they were more interested in complaining about the ad-funded-services landscape and muse on their stances around it, as opposed to actually putting their money where their mouth is.
All I can say is, I am not paying for YT Premium out of some ideological standpoint or love for Google (not even close). It has genuinely been just worth it for me many times over in the exact practical ways I was expecting it to.
I think they are carefully riding the balance between being free for the masses with ads while milking those who have the funds to get rid of ads.
I reckon they will continue to increase their subscriber base where other streaming services are plateuing.
Certainly, YouTube Premium has been worth it for me. A big quality of life improver.
https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/20-years-125-million-sub...
If YouTube was subscription only, hypothetically, I would just not use it, and my life would be same as it is now.
There are a great many services that are nice to have, but very few I would bother paying for out of my wallet. Given the choice of paying for them or not using them, I would just walk away from most of them.
I'd bet the ratio of time I have spent legit learning something useful vs just using it as distraction/entertainment ("educational" channels are often just entertainment for nerds like us)/background, it has to be something like 1000 to 1. I wouldn't need to replace the 999 at all. I guess I would read books a bit more, probably get a lot more done on personal projects, go out a bit more etc.
Not clear at all my life would be worse off except in that pinch where I need to know how to disassemble & fix the thing, right now.
But for the most part - probably nothing. For everything else, it'd just be either some other free option, or like going back to the internet of the early 2000s, which would be good and bad in its own ways.
People are curious creatures indeed.
I pay for email and some other services. Some other services, not so much. I find it hard to support some companies financially because I don't agree with their basic modus operandi. It's not the money; it's who it goes to.
If only we could convince large crowds to choose more free alternatives.
While I don't love my money going to Google, I find YouTube's overall quality astronomically higher than Instagram/Twitter/TikTok/etc. and the amount of censorship/"moderation"/controversy has been relatively limited. When I find something I really want to keep I have always been able to download it without much trouble.
Of course, as a "free" customer I'm already subject to their whims whenever they decide to add another advertising layer.
1. Users are spread around the world. This isn't a site with 70% US visitors.
2. The majority of users run ad block, and this continues to rise.
3. Ad rates plummet each year. I earn about 5x less on the site now, than in the past, with the same number of active users, and 3x as many advertisements.
I've tried all the major advertising networks. I setup header bidding and signed direct deals with large networks, such as AppNexus, Amazon, Yahoo, AOL, etc. At the end of the day, ads do not pay well for my audience.
Users can pay $3/mo to remove advertising. Yes, I'm aware that's $36/yr, when the average registered user is generating less than $0.50/yr in ad revenue. About 30% of paying users choose to pay higher than $3/mo for no additional benefit (they can pay any amount they wish). I also have some individuals that have paid thousands of dollars.
What would happen if I offered a $1/yr plan for an ad free experience, so it's more inline with ad revenues? I honestly don't know, but I would guess I would lose a few of the $3/mo paying users, and gain less than 100 users paying $1/yr, so it would likely be net negative.
With the fee to remove advertising, you'd need to use all the price discrimination tricks to maximize revenue. E.g., have sales, have discount codes, etc., and it would still not be close to the price discrimination possible via ads.
I also wonder what the income of OP's bubble was when they were not paying for WhatsApp.
I block all ads and wish commercial ads would cease to exist even though it would mean I couldn't use somethings anymore without payment.
Youtube is also moving into that direction.
Whats the point of paid, premium service like Spotify if I keep being served those stupid, dishonest and bordeline illegally deceiving Shopify ads every 15 minutes.
Such a strange business model, making the free version below acceptable.
That's because the core product is not anywhere near worth what they charge for it. The youtube interface is a nightmare for users and creators alike. I have very little controls over what I do and don't see, how I can filter or search for content, or how I can search for new content. History of both videos and comments are effectively non existent and impossible to reasonably search or archive.
It's not a service so much as it is a copyright clearinghouse.
If they had an actual experience with worthwhile features to offer then they wouldn't have to artificially degrade the free experience to convince you.
Absolute bullshit.
They don’t create nor curate much content.
I am curious about the poster who has learned so much from YouTube — I have tried learning many topics from science to programming to home repairs, and finding a quality program can be very challenging, and there are a lot of programs which are actually elaborate sales pitches.
I would rather pay a fee than watch ads, but as long as “do neither of those” is an option I’ll be picking that. If they remove that as an option I’ll either pay or not watch YouTube.
Probably not watch.
I pay for email, and was paying for search until something about the way kagi integrates with safari annoyed me. I’ve been paying more for a seedbox than Netflix costs for longer than Netflix has existed. That’s part for ad avoidance as in it initially replaced free to air tv but ad avoidance is just one factor in the best experience for my time and money trade off I’m trying to make. So i know I’m willing to both pay for things i can get ad supported from Google and also pay for a better media experience.
When it comes to that best experience for my time and money trade off though, even with money being set at zero, the vast majority of the YouTube i watch is already in the negative. Most things i watch on there, i regret the cost of just the time it took to watch the content before ads or money even gets in to it.
Which i think is a big part of the issue with ad supported internet going fee based. YouTube and so many ad supported sites and games are already just super low value and derive most of their consumption not from people making intentional lifestyle choices of “i want to be the kind of person who watches garbage all day while playing crap” but rather people making bad short term vs long term trade offs and falling in to holes of recommendations and fun looking thumbnails.
Paying for something leads to asking yourself “is this worth $x?” And i know that for at least myself $x is a large negative number. I’d pay more than the current cost of YouTube premium to definitely NOT be able to watch YouTube.
What I mean is that, IMO, ads by themselves are only a small part of the puzzle. Paying for YT premium doesn't sound enticing if it only gets rid of the ad part and not the surveillance machinery.
I do pay for my email that does no tracking and has good UX. I allow ads on duckduckgo because they actually respect my privacy and don't try to trick me all the time. I also pay for Spotify premium and have donated to Signal and Mozilla, but I won't support the likes of Google and Meta.
I want to pay the small fee, through a simple to use portal, that makes it obvious how to cancel, and if I'm being obligated to a multi month term or not. I also want my payment card details to be perfectly secure and for none of my private information or usage to be sold to third parties.
> who actually pays for YT Premium.
Have you ever asked them "why don't you?" Or "what would it take to get you to pay?" Or even, "would you take a free month to see if it's worth it?"
Point being I don't think the problem is nearly as black and white as you've apparently surmised.
Depends on the price.
I'm guessing lots of folks are paying $1/month to Apple to upgrade from the free 5GB tier of iCloud storage to get to the 50GB tier.
WhatsApp charged people $1 per year before being acquired by Facebook:
* https://venturebeat.com/mobile/whatsapp-subscription/
Supposedly about a billion people paid for that at the time. Even if they went to $1 per month, that'd be fairly cheap (and WhatsApp ran fairly lean, personnel-wise: fifty FTEs).
(I worked for WhatsApp from 2011-2019)
From that article, user count was about 900 Million when the fee was ended; user count was about 450 M in Feb 2014 when the acquisition was announced [1]. Either way, it is a mistake to think everyone was paying.
A) Some people still had lifetime accounts from when the app was $1 for iPhone, or from the typical late December limited time free for iPhone promotions. Windows Phone got marked as lifetime for a while due to a bug/oversight that took a while to get noticed.
B) Enforcement was limited. A lot of users wouldn't have had a payment method that WhatsApp could accept; demanding payment when there's no way to pay isn't good for anybody. For a long time, we didn't even implement payment enforcement; we'd go through and extend subscriptions for a year, initially by manual script, then through automation. When we did build payment enforcement, I think we only set it on for Spain and maybe the US. Everywhere else would get the reminders that the account was going to expire, and then on the day of, it would silently extend the account and not bug you again for a while. Even where payment enforcement was on, it would only lock you out for I think a week, then your account would be extended and maybe you'd pay next time.
Adding on, for a lot of users, the hassle of paying $1 is a bigger deal than the actual $1; but so for people in lower income countries, it's both --- a) it's hard to pay $1 to a US country for a large number of people, b) there are countries with significant number of people living on a dollar a day; I don't think it's reasonable to ask them to forgo a days worth of living to pay for a messenger.
I don't remember numbers, and there's not a lot of financial reporting, because WhatsApp numbers are so small compared to the rest of FB/Meta, but there's a first half 2014 report [2] that shows revenue of $15M. Assuming payments are even over the year (probably not a good assumption, but we don't have good numbers), that'd be maybe 30 Million paying users (some users bought multiple years though), or less than 10%.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-26266689
[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...
One day the app asked me to pay. It was less than 1 Euro per year, I think. I never associated a credit card to the app store (Android) so I did not pay and waited to see what would happen.
It kept asking for money for a few days but it kept working, so I thought they were not serious about it. Then it stopped asking. It started asking for money again after a few months but I remembered what happened before so I waited again. It kept working and eventually stopped asking for money. This pattern repeated a few times until maybe the time FB bought it.
I believe that if it stopped working people would have switched en masse to another app, maybe Telegram? We also had Viber and probably FB messenger too.
Switches happened many times in the 90s and early 2000s. I remember AIM, ICQ, MSN, then Skype. Whole networks of people moved to the next one or used more than one to message different friends. WhatsApp never had a chance to earn money directly from its users IMHO.
Huh, is that what it was... I had a Windows Phone 2012-2013 and I think I signed up for WhatsApp on it and I remember chatting with a friend on it and he was talking about the $1 per year thing and I went to check, and it said I have lifetime and I was confused how I ended up with that, but was using it so lightly that I didn't bother to look into why. I figured maybe there was a promotion the day I signed up or something.
IIRC, you had to have signed up with windows phone, switching phones to windows phone wouldn't grant you lifetime (switching to iPhone while the app was paid on iOS would; a delay on that was added to avoid abuse of borrow your friend's iPhone, re-register and then switch back).
Can I ask why Spain specifically?
The US never had a high user count, but it was chosen because US tech journalism sets the narrative. If you want people to pay around the world, convince US tech journalists that payment enforcement is on, and the knowledge that you need to pay filters through the world in a way that it doesn't by just enforcing payment in Spain.
See also: the invisibility of Nokia phones when they pissed off US carriers with SIP clients and left the US market; despite being the top selling phone manufacture of both feature phones and smart phones, there were no media stories about them.
What I was talking about was paying by being exposed to ads vs. paying directly, and increased iCloud storage has no former option.
Which is why many of them say things like "skip these ads if you like Im not getting any of it" or "Im here primarily for exposure, I make my money elsewhere".
Literally on the first link I clicked on on cbs the advertiser somehow figured out how to make my browser redirect to some super-sketchy site saying I was the 5 billionth google search and won blah blah blah.
Browsing without adblock is an unacceptable security risk so long as google et all refuse to audit and comprehensively secure the code they demand to run on my laptop.
So the alternative seems to be "free, with ads" or "paid, with ads"
I love paying for ad-removal. Take. My. Money.
That's because micropayments are still fucking annoying to do on both sides of any transaction:
- credit cards: cheap-ish at scale (2-5%), but users don't want to give random apps their CC details and integrating with Stripe/Paypal/whatever has the cost of UX flow break due to account details and 2FA compliance bullshit. In addition, every service paid-for by CC has the problem that only people with a CC can pay for it (so people in countries like Europe where "classic" bank accounts prevail are out of luck, and so are people in countries deemed too poor and/or fraud-affiliated are locked out entirely), and you gotta deal with tax and other regulatory compliance around handling payments as well. Oh and people will try to use your service to validate stolen payment credentials because a 1$ charge (especially for a well known service like Whatsapp) is most likely to be ignored by the accountholder even if fraudulent in nature, which in turn will lead to issues with chargebacks or, worst case, getting dropped entirely by the payment processor.
- in-app purchases: expensive (30% cut for the platform provider), serious headache to do when a significant chunk of the user base doesn't run phones with properly licensed Google Play Store (e.g. Huawei who aren't allowed to embed Play Store on their phones)
- bank transfer: possible, but restricted to the economic zones where there's enough customer base to justify the expenses of setting up a local company with a bank account (i.e. US, EU, India, possibly China), and transaction fees from the banks may end up being >>50% of the transaction's face value at such low amounts
- crxptxcurrency: even more of a hassle for customers to acquire, questionable legality / KYC issues, no realtime authorization due to mandatory waiting time for mining to confirm transactions
- pay by phone bill, premium numbers: possible, but need bureaucracy in each country, fraud / "my kid did it" complaints will run rampant, premium number calls are by default blocked in most if not all modern phone contracts ever since the early '00s and "dialer" fraud malware, difficult to associate with customer's phone number in the backend
In the end, if you truly want to capture a global audience with microtransaction payments, be prepared to deal with a loooooooooooooooooot of bullshit just to get started.
Long story short, we desperately need a global government effort to standardize payments at low fees. There's absolutely zero reason why banks and other intermediaries should be allowed to skim off more than 5% of any kind of transaction. ZERO.
Europe though, yeah they’re killing it.
Nebula, the answer to the tyranny of Youtube (who works for advertisers), has a <1% conversion rate despite tons of huge Youtubers pushing it. Vid.me, the previous answer to youtubes tyranny, went bankrupt because people hate ads and also hate subscriptions, nor do they donate.
I could write pages about this, but I wish I could violently shake all the children (many who are now in their 40's) that so deeply feel entitled to free content on the internet, and scream "If you are not paying directly for the product, you have no right to complain about the product".
In reality the ad model is not going anywhere. Given the choice, people overwhelmingly chose to let the advertisers steer the ship if it means "free" entry.
But I feel a better example of paying for convenience is the Twitch subscriber system. They make it work in a way that others fail at by tying it in to various things like emotes and channel points and the general sense of supporting the creators. I know YT memberships exist, but I don't know how widely those are used and they just don't seem to get pushed as much.
YouTube have many competitors and some of them are enormous, such as Netflix and cable TV. Production companies are popping up all the time and are making some of the world's highest quality material. The same for individuals who are making videos.
Or do you mean that YouTube needs a competitor that does exactly the same thing as YouTube?
Essentially, youtube adds more video every single day than the entirety of every other streaming service offers combined.
Youtube is in it's own category, and it's unsurprising no else wants to touch it.
But everybody has to start somewhere. Would it be impossible for Netflix to start adding for example 100 000 hours of user generated video per day?
The scales of the two models are very different. Ingesting content is more complicated with user generated content because there's few guarantees about formats (encoding, color, file formats). Serving the content is also more complicated because it's not as friendly to edge caches as studio content. Part of the expense of YouTube is the long tail of content. Popular content might live in edge caches but YouTube serves up old unpopular stuff too.
Providers would be more than happy to sell Netflix the build out
Probably not many. OTOH, I pay for Fastmail and NextDNS (both for at least 5 years at this point).
People give strange looks when I mention paying for e-mail, even people "in the know."
SAAS offerings for individuals don't have a lot of market share (streaming services aside). The exception might be iCloud/GMail harassing people about running out of storage, and people just eventually going "sure, here's 3 bucks a month."
Internet is a paid service.
When I first accessed the internet in the 1980s, the only paid "service" necessary to use it was internet service. There was not the plethora of VC-funded third parties trying to act as intermediaries. The term "internet" amongst younger generations usually means only www sites, maybe app "endpoints" and _nothing else_. This is such a waste of potential.
Today's internet is more useful than the 1980s internet. But I do not attribute that to third party intermediaries that only seek to profit from other peoples' use of it. I attribute the increased utility to technological improvements in hardware, including networking equipment. I do not attribute the increased utility to "improvements" in software, and certainly not the proliferation of software distributed for free as a Trojan Horse for those seeking to profit from data collection, surveillance and advertising services.
The idea of paying for what these intermediaries try to call "services" makes no sense to me. Certainly, paying these intermediaries will not prevent them from data collection and surveillance for commercial purposes. (There are already examples.) It only subsidises this activity. Perhaps people believe these intermediaries engage in data collection, surveillance and ad services because "no one will pay for their software" instead of considering that they do so because they can, because there are few laws to prevent them. It was unregulated activity and is stilll grossly underregulated activity. It is more profitable than software licensing.
I'm guessing most people didn't pay though, since they scraped the fee (even before FB bought them). I guess it was just too little money to be worth the effort.
The fee wasn't enforced in many developing countries, and some users elsewhere will have been jumping through the delete-and-reinstall hoops (which was painful because it lost chat history) to avoid paying.
But with 1bn active users at the time the fee was dropped, it would still have been bringing in more than enough revenue to have sustained Whatsapp as an independent business if they had chosen not to sell to FB.
So I think I got that...
That's nothing at this scale of users and speaks volumes for the ingenuity of their staff.
The only ones driving even leaner than that are StackOverflow with just nine servers [2].
[1] https://highscalability.com/how-whatsapp-grew-to-nearly-500-...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34950843
I wouldn’t pay Meta or similar companies for messaging services. And especially not for siloed messaging networks.
Sure, it’s easy to get some 20 or 30-something year old with a cushy 6 figure salary to pay 20 USD or similar per month for some digital service (esp. when they are building some digital service themselves, so they know what it entails). For someone strugling to make ends meet, there’s many higher priority things than some digital service when there’s free alternatives, let alone email.
And your privacy concerns? In my experience, absolutely non-existent in the real world. Actually I only ever hear about them in HN, not even my software development coworkers. Just the other day there was some raffle where there was some weekend trip to somewhere as a prize, but you had to give all your personal details, there was a big queue, they would’ve given their blood type details (if not literally a few ccs of their blood) and told them all about their kinkiest fantasy if they’d asked for it. Literally, I’m not joking.
Rounded to the nearest meaningful number - 0%
There must be some some number that makes it viable to have free users and paid users. For games, the free users are usually those who provide the "content".
People usually demonize freemium games but IMHO its much more benign than extracting huge sums by artificially making it worse and sell attention.
Are you talking for direct, by credit card payments that somehow you can't cancel? Can you explain a bit?
As for the darkest of dark patterns - give Adobe some money and see what happens.
Think gyms where you refuse to cancel even when you are physically there in person with someone to yell at and imagine trying to do the same online where there's not a phone number, or a phone number with a 1 hour wait and a CSR paid based on if they can successfully not give you what you want
they are just there for the captive network effect, which will take a hit the second or becomes a freemium or ad ridden service.
those are literal public forums people go to expose themselves. you don't have a very good point.
If I understand it correctly, people use it mainly because MMS was a dumpster fire and WA was the first platform which got critical mass in most countries, which it achieved by being both pretty good overall and by being cross-platform.
The encryption is a nice bonus that everybody likes, but you can't prove that is a primary or even major reason why plumbers in India, tour guides in Dubai, and school parent groups in the US all choose to communicate with it, personally and professionally. If anything, I feel like Signal must have by now poached a good number of the people whose main concern is "How encrypted is it?"
Also, Gmail is not a public forum and people don't mind that it's 'ad-ridden' either.
I’m pretty convinced I’d pay 10x or more than that amount for a completely ad free version but I can’t be sure.
Part of me thinks the reason why they don’t offer that paid ad-free version of Facebook (which they built to try and appease the EU regulators) in the US is because their ARPU is so high that people would laugh at the price “Facebook/IG Premium” would have to cost.
Also, don’t forget that at least for now, paid subscriptions to social media apps would need to pay a 30% rent to the platform owner duopoly. This means that the price it would be it would cost would need to be 42% above than its ad ARPU just to break even.
So, those numbers reflect a capital inflow to the US market rather than (as many people think) absurdly high conversion US users.
Meta stopped reporting user numbers/CPMs by geography after the market freaked out when user growth plateaued in the US (because they'd acquired basically everyone).
But the capital inflow is also because there is a lot of consumer spending in the US to convert.
The problem is Whatsapp is a closed ecosystem so unlike email we can't just buy a provider.
And I do pay for youtube. The experience is well worth it and I'm thankful I can afford it (it's not a lot but many can't).
In my opinion, it’s rarely about “can’t” when we’re talking about 12 bucks a month or whatever. It’s about the psychology: when a free tier exists, people reframe it in their heads that paying for that thing is an extravagance. Relatedly, removing the free tier altogether also has dangerous effects, as people immediately jump to “I can’t believe you’re taking away the free thing I used to have” outrage, while nobody complains about not having free access to say, HBO.
Ads mean each user 'pays' you according to their spending power
Kinda socialist when you think about it! From each according from his ability...
[1] Obviously companies try to get around this with price discrimination, but it's hard especially for a network effect platform
It will make people accept anything and everything that they would never otherwise accept. They will line up for hours, they will accept hostile and toxic messages being screamed into their faces, they will humiliate themselves, they will spend sleepless nights, they will willingly enslave themselves, they will wither away in sickness, they will murder millions in the most cruel way imaginable.
All for "free".
Societies in our history were not arranged in the same way around money, because probably there was some knowledge of the two-sided curse of avarice and stinginess. I'm talking about medieval and post-medieval society, where most people didn't use or have money in their everyday life. Instead they had duties.
Some of us actually paid for WhatsApp! I think it was about $1 a year when it launched. At the time it was providing significant value, especially in areas where cross-border communication was common.
I'm sure $1 isn't enough to cover costs anymore but someone could make a nice living charging $5-10 a month for something similar. The problem is people will always sell out to investors and fuck over their users. It's inevitable.
If you’re not on WhatsApp, no updates or news from your kids school, your sports team, your family, your car dealership etc. for you.
But since January the trust in Meta has not only plummeted but it's become a mainstream enough talking point that I now receive invites to join Signal groups from--for want of a better term--normal people. Two of the local parenting groups I'm on are on Signal and no one ever mentions it or questions it, it's just "here's the group link" and the expectation that everyone has it installed.
I switched phones and lost all my history. Now I’m fairly careful with these things, and make backups, but even I wasn’t able to get it back. Couldn’t recommend it to anyone since.
There’s a line between being secure and being useful, and they’re slightly unbalanced in Signal.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=NL&q=%2Fm%2F012...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_government_group...
NL clearly has some background interest in signal however, unlike the UK, which spikes on this story alone:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=GB&q=%2Fm%2F012...
But tbh if they keep the ads out of messages I don’t see it an affecting people much.
But I manage without WhatsApp (it’s also a privileged position to do so). Not having WhatsApp also helps avoid seeing all the junk and misinformation that people forward on it without any thought. There’s actually a name for this in India: “WhatsApp University”, which is a derogatory term for how people believe anything they read on WhatsApp and share it around without any analysis or thought or skepticism whatsoever.
This sort of analysis is very surface-level I think. My impression is WhatsApp offered that by running on VC money and had no plan to run an actual business. That's not a question of focus. It's an unsustainable, please monetise me later land grab.
[1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...
Zuck Says Ads Aren’t The Way To Monetize Messaging, WhatsApp Will Prioritize Growth Not Subscriptions
"Monetization was the big topic on today’s analyst call after Facebook announced it acquired WhatsApp for a jaw-dropping total of $19 billion. That’s $4 billion in cash and $12 billion in stock, and it reserved $3 billion in restricted stock units to retain the startup’s employees. But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, CFO David Ebersman, and WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum all said that won’t be a priority for the next few years. And when the time does come to monetize aggressively, it won’t be through ads"
Even for years after they were acquired by Meta, Jan refused to allow advertising and kept pushing the $1 dollar per user subscription fee. Sheryl nixed it b/c it was "not scalable."
VC's may have the mindset that the founders will eventually acquiesce to ads, but also they didn't really care b/c all they wanted was an exit, which they got.
The founders, however, were never interested in an ad business and hold that POV to this day.
Fair enough, but the founders don't necessarily make these decisions. I wasn't particularly referring to them. If they got VC money (I don't know if they did or not) then the VCs must've had something in mind to get a decent return on their risk.
End-to-end encryption was added by Meta, they reused (part of) the Signal app code for this.
This was a big topic for years, I am surprised by this oversight.
A massive oversight on the authors part and completely missing the point of early WhatsApp as first status update application and then SMS replacement.
With it being Meta I can be sure I will pay and still have my data and privacy violated.
It should be a law of nature that whatever Meta/Facebook acquires will surely be ad-riddled & 'spyware' infested regardless of the "we won't" promises they swear to abide by.
What does this mean exactly?
See the image here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_list
Popular format on Youtube, reddit, etc.
Sounds like SMS.
RCS has replaced MMS as a protocol back in 2008 and it's only now gaining traction. Many carriers have shut down their RCS infrastructure half a decade ago, though, so they're not exactly jumping on the chance to turn it back on.
Was it a client thing or a protocol thing?
Whatsapp felt so responsive back in the day. I'd be pinging my family in real time halfway across the globe on mobile in 2009. For Free. That was a killer app...
Why did MMS fail where Whatsapp succeeded?
Any tech company who must say, "we don't harvest your information", is a tech company that harvests your information.
> We can't read your messages or listen to your calls, and no one else can either.
Should we be suspicious of Signal as well?
More to the point, I thought the principle was "Any man who must say, "I am the King", is no true king."? That seems to leave no room for hedging, like only distrusting "global data gathering conglomerate" or whatever. If you're have to do a holistic assessment of an organization's governance structure and incentives, you're basically admitting that witty one-liners like the above are pointless, which was my point.
What's preventing them from serving a backdoored version? xz was open source as well, that didn't stop the backdoor. There might be reproducible builds on android, but you can't even inspect the executable on iOS without jailbreaking.
[1] https://molly.im/
I had been voluntold to be on the ads team, because I had sent a list of things that needed to be done to make ads doable and not terrible. Of course, none of my ideas were deemed feasible at the time, including figuring our the ToS stuff, because no use building a product you can't launch and ToS changes aren't easy.
Don't sell yourself short ... they did all the things to make ads doable it was just not feasible to make them not terrible.
In my mind, early focus on ToS could have possibly gotten the change more palletable/directed the project towards more palletable choices or perhaps more likely gotten to the cancellation decision faster and people could work on different things.
literal chat dialog tree with 4 options that is not connected to anything for around 250k/year.
Any ads are in addition to this, not instead of.
[1]: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/whatsapp/pricing/
If Signal could address these concerns I'd be happy to move away from Whatsapp.
With this news I'll likely need to reassess my use of Whatsapp again.
It’s frustrating that it’s basically only Telegram and WhatsApp that take desktop platforms seriously.
It's really hard to clean up media. You have to go into every single chat and from there go about deleting stuff. At least they finally added a "select all" option in there recently.
So the size of it just grows and grows and grows until it's using all the space on your phone. Not a good fit for non-technical types.
Secondly, no web view. There is the desktop app yes, which is flaky, slow and wants to update every day or two.
I just can't see average people putting up with those inconveniences and that's just a couple of them.
To be fair I've met plenty of non-techie types whose phones were "full" of stuff from WhatsApp or photos that had already been backed up, because the idea they could clear their local storage would never cross their minds. I've seen people buy new phones instead of clearing their cache.
The slightly longer version of the story is that my wife, travelling alone, had some trouble with an iPhone update (it hung for hours), and so she took it to the nearest Genius Bar; they eventually got the update to apply, but then did a factory reset “just to be safe”. Of course, everything except her Signal message history was restored from the automatic iCloud backups. She was devastated, and refuses to touch it now.
Please do not reply to say this was the fault of the Apple Store employee. It was, but at the same time, it also very much wasn't.
What is the alternative though? A private chat app, mobile + desktop, syncing, with enough ease of setup and use for normies to adopt? I don't see it.
Current networks have way more lock in than back in the day.
Ads will make more people Signal-curious, or even drive people back to text messages. The average person who switches will convince a non-zero number of their contacts to come with them. The shift will start gradually. Think of Skype, which at one point everyone I knew was on. That network didn't protect them from being replaced by competitors.
People are also increasingly worried about retaliation from the government for their supposedly free speech, which has already driven a few people I know to secure alternatives that aren't operated by Trump allies.
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I was honestly expecting it, after recently seeing on a friend's phone that it already essentially turned to social media on Android. They can't yet push it on the higher income iPhone users (lest they switch to other messenger apps), but change is coming rather inevitably since it's nothing but untapped advertising dollars potential in the eyes of the behemoth that is Meta.
I don't think there's a sustainable solution here except to self-host a Matrix server for family and friends if you have the time, money and technical expertise.
Unique but I believe fundamentally incorrect take on the Internet...
“No ads! No games! No gimmicks!”
I wonder how the early founders feel about what Whatsapp has become with random junk and gimmicks in the UI.
Wouldn't mind doing it again.
Unfortunately now they're owned by a Silicon Valley company so I guess 0.99 is too little for them, they'll charge the price of a SV latte... how much is that? 59.99? 99.99?
I assume one would need a Java disassembler at least. On desktop, something like recaf works and allows changing things in classes without the full recompilation.
Is there something like this for android?
I say halfway because some apps have a fallback, built-in, ad when it can't reach the server, other serve the ads from their own servers so no way to block them. Most only leave a blank space.
I use the hosts file from there, and edit it manually via "adb root" (lineageos. root only via adb)
finally people will start to move out of whatsbook!
....i hope
Our initial use case -- why we're building this -- is parents who are currently using text groups in Apple Messages or WhatsApp to share photos/videos of their kiddos with friends/family and want something less interruptive and more casual, but for whom social media is so toxic and untrusted as to be a non-starter.