Facebook and Instagram may introduce an ad-free subscription, in response to European Union policies surrounding data collection.
In the social media world, monetisation is a confusing thing. These larger platforms that allow anyone to post anything to a huge amount of people for free have gotten by in previous years through ad sales and targeted ads, sold on the pitch of having a captive audience. But lately, subscriptions have been explored as ways to shake down users – Twitter’s (X’s) ‘Blue’ or ‘X Premium’ is the best example of this, offering half the usual ads and a blue tick, and Meta’s ‘Meta Verified’ subscription also warrants a mention, though all it really provides is a paid verification tick and a boost of your posts.
Now, Meta may be about to introduce a different type of subscription that removes ads from Facebook and Instagram entirely. That is, according to Tech Radar, by way of The New York Times (paywalled). Sources told the New York Times that the new ad subscriptions are in response to regulatory scrutiny.
Earlier this year, Meta was fined $120 billion euros over the alleged mishandling of user data in Europe. The company has started to offer users the ability to opt out of targeted ads in Europe.
Whether or not Facebook and Instagram’s ad-free subscription services will actually materialise though, is another thing. We don’t even know how much it’ll cost, although if X Premium costs $20 per month and Meta Verified costs $12 per month, it’s fair to imagine that a subscription would likely be in this ballpark.
Heck, it may even just be introduced to the European Market and not elsewhere. Meta has faced tonnes of scrutiny in Europe for its handling of data, and it’s suspected that this heavy scrutiny is why the company still hasn’t launched Instagram Threads, the company’s answer to Twitter, in the European market.
Meta Verified was originally introduced to the Australian and New Zealand markets as a test bed, so it’s reasonable to expect the same could be the case for an ad-free tier, but that’s just speculation.
If it does get introduced, though, it’ll be interesting to see the sales pitch. Hopefully, the introduction of an ad-free subscription won’t mean that more ads will be served to those who don’t pay.