in 2022, advertising revenue amounted to close to 113 billion U.S. dollars whereas payments and other fees revenues amounted to around two billion U.S. dollars.

With roughly three billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2023, Facebook is the most used online social network worldwide.

113/3 = about $38 per user per year

14*12 = $168 per user per year

Which would be a mark-up (a Zuck-up?) of 342%.

You do have to figure though, that it’s only the most active users who will opt to pay $14/month, and it’s those same highly-active users that contribute the most to the ad revenue.

Having no idea how those stats actually break down, we could take a wild guess and do a Pareto Principle 80/20.

Say the top 20% active users constitute 80% of the ad revenue, and those same top 20% all switch to the paid model:

(113*0.8)/(3*0.2) = about $151 per VIP user per year

…which is a lot closer to the $168. Zuck-up of about 11%.

80/20 is probably cutting them too much slack, but the real markup is probably closer to 11% than it is to 342%.

This is also not factoring the extra operational expense of supporting the new model.

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Math part over, here’s my take:

This is good.

Ad-based models are toxic. We poisoned our culture, bulldozed our privacy, distorted the economy, gave unfathomable power to immature narcissistic opportunists, and underdeveloped public FOSS tech because we expected privately-owned services to be Free™ even though they could never be literally free.

This is a move towards unmasking these services and revealing the real economic gears whizzing around behind them.

The more people understand what their privacy and autonomy is worth to these companies, the more they might insist on keeping it — and maybe even seek out places where they don’t have to pay for the privilege.

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Sources:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/268604/annual-revenue-of-facebook

https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/