Europeans will soon have the option to pay to stop ads in Meta apps. Yes, there’s a catch.
They can agree to see ads based on Meta’s tracking of what they do online and their whereabouts. Or they can stop ads on Facebook and Instagram if they pay about $17 a month. on Monday — at a higher price than a standard Netflix subscription — appears to be Meta’s savvy way to offer a paid version that few people will buy to shut up European regulators tightening the rules of Meta’s business.
I’ll suggest that a focus on subscriptions is a distraction from what you deserve. Companies should collect less data on everyone.European regulators and courts want people to have an explicit choice of what’s now an implicit agreement: If people use Meta, they essentially let the company collect as much personal information as it can get away with to show ads.The subscription will cost the equivalent of about $10.60 a month starting in November.
But Europeans who choose a subscription could bring in more money for Meta. From rough calculations from Meta’s financial disclosures, the company generates less than $8 each month on average from each person using Facebook in Europe.Those figures count people in large countries such as Russia and Turkey who won’t have the option of a subscription without ads.
Meta is right that billions of people can connect online and access news and entertainment because they’re paid for with ads.But companies don’t need to stockpile data on every restaurant you’ve visited or all the contacts on your phone to show you a swimsuit ad.That’s how many apps, such as Google and Meta, work, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
If you buy the YouTube Premium subscription to stop ads in videos plus get access to YouTube’s Spotify-like music service, it now costs $13.99 a month in the United States if you purchase from YouTube.com. It’s $18.99 a month if you buy the subscription from YouTube’s iPhone app.
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Facebook and Instagram launch paid ad-free subscriptions in EuropeChristopher Hutton is a technology reporter for the Washington Examiner covering Big Tech companies like Facebook and X as well as the regulatory efforts by Washington to rein in the tech companies. He previously wrote for a number of other outlets, including Daily Dot, Pando Daily, Religion Unplugged, and other outlets.
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