How much would you pay for an ad-free social media experience? It’s a tricky question that prompts plenty of subquestions, including whether you would even want such a thing.
Does your budget stretch that far given how your bond has ballooned this past year? And, how does one value the integrity — for lack of a better word — of the social media experience?
We’ve been making these value calls in streaming media spheres for a while. I happily pay my Spotify subs monthly, for example, because having adverts interrupting my music mid-workout or mid-singalong would make me homicidal. And yet when my favourite podcast starts off with a handful of ads for American food delivery services I will never use grin-and-bear-it as a cost-of-content thing.
I’m a writer after all; I know our creatives must earn a living somehow. But ads in our Facebook, Instagram and Twitter-now-X feeds? They’re so ubiquitous we barely notice them. They’ve evolved over time, adding images, video, carousels, in-app checkout and more, and we’ve adjusted our expectations just as quickly.
When Google first introduced paid search results we had to reorient our brains to make the little leap down the page to avoid the hard-sells floating above the actual results ... or not, I suppose, if buying something was what set you off searching in the first place. It probably happened so organically that you didn’t know you were doing it.
Then they changed it up again, tagging and mixing results so you had to train your eye, or in terms of social scrolling, become immune. When the same relentless at-home-skin-laser-device advert interrupts my happy-dogs-on-the-beach Reels again, I simply skip without losing stride. Amazon “finds”? I can’t hear you. Weight loss ads? Hit that “hide ad”.
We’ve been in a kind of attention arms race. Raised as we are in this ad-rich world, most of us have developed built-in deflector shields. And online advertisers fight to break through, employing tactics such as rage-farming, confirmation bias, peer endorsements, weaponised insecurity and tracking to arrest us, mid-scroll, and eke out a coveted click or conversion.
For much of the lifespan of social media advertising has been the base charge, the “pay to play” we have all accepted. But what if it didn’t have to be this way?
This rumination is inspired by a mere rumour, but a bombshell one: the New York Times reported late last week that Meta is considering launching an ad-free paid subscription option for Facebook and Instagram users. This zig in its standard zag is not prompted by the revelation that humble users are being harassed by opportunistic e-tailers that change URLs every time you click that “Not interested” X icon, respawning like a villain’s secret twin sister in a ’90s soap opera...
Rather, a handful of unnamed Meta insiders told the newspaper that a subscription offering is being considered as a strategy to appease the EU regulators, which are imposing a raft of regulations aimed at protecting the privacy and data of EU citizens. Of course, with this tentative, whispery origin story no timelines or price points are available, and Meta’s spokespeople would not be drawn in.
It would be a helluva concession to offer, if — big if, in my opinion — it actually addresses the EU’s privacy concerns. But since ad revenues are under pressure anyway (more below), it might be a plan. And given the reach of Meta, if Facebook and Instagram go that way it could really shift the entire social playbook.
“The company has been fighting with the EU and other European regulators around alleged privacy violations from its ad-tracking services and data transfers. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission fined Meta $1.3bn for transferring data of European users to the US, a violation of GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation],” The Verge summarises.
Transparency
The EU’s Digital Services Act, which is still coming into full effect, will also require greater transparency from big tech and social media providers, particularly in the areas of advertising and content moderation.
There’s also the matter of the Apple App Tracking Transparency effect. When Apple released the iOS 14.5 update to devices in 2021 it gave users the option to tell their app providers not to track them across sites and apps. Users loved it. Social media platforms did not.
In February 2022, David Wehner (one of Meta’s C-suites) told investors that Apple’s decision would cost them about $10bn that year. It’s not that Meta’s in imminent financial trouble, but the squeeze hurt it, and it has worked hard to improve ad targeting independent of the juicy iOS data, including in its artificial intelligence (AI)-driven suite of ad automation tools, Advantage.
Elon Musk’s formerly blue X app launched its paid tiers recently, to plenty of criticism and hilarity, but when the dust settled and the check-marks were more sensibly allocated, there was a sparkling new revenue stream for Musk’s team. The value isn’t sufficient for me to make the swap yet, but I can see why it is for certain brands, businesses and public figures ... assuming the general platform rot doesn’t sink the X ship.
So, to answer my own hypothetical, the freemium age of social media is probably not over just yet. There’s plenty of money to be made from the avalanche of online advertising we’re still being served, and the market for ad-free subscription social media is still to be explored. But I wonder: will ad-free social media one day be a social flex?
“Oh gosh, dahling, you’re still getting served advertising?! You simply must subscribe. I’ve outsourced all my shopping to AI anyway.”
• Thompson Davy, a freelance journalist, is an impactAFRICA fellow and WanaData member.
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