Over on Smoothspan is this interesting post mooting the concept of allowing facebook customers to pay to NOT receive inline adds.
I haven’t double checked Bob’s maths but what he states is that;
- Assuming 20% of people opted for no adds at USD1/month – revenue derived would be going on USD100mill
- The revenue from the remaining adds would be largely unchanged as those paying to not see adds are unlikely to be clickers-through in any case
It’s a novel and innovative concept – nice thinking Bob.
Ben Kepes is an analyst, an entrepreneur, a commentator and a business adviser. His business interests include a diverse range of industries from manufacturing to property to technology. As a technology commentator he has a broad presence both in the traditional media and extensively online. Ben covers the convergance of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users. 
Except that people don’t pay to subscribe to services or to hide ads on the Internet.
The majority of people are firm believers that advertising is bad, and they don’t care if a website owner needs to make money to run the operation.
Most people want everything for free. I am sorry, but it is just as it is. As much as they hate advertising and complain about it, they won’t pay to have it gone from their favourite websites. It’s very different from subscription TV, although if you think of it the model is the same. Just a different mindset.
Valid point MF – but either way it doesn’t matter. If facebook offered this there would be two possible outcomes
1) people took it up, they made some more revenue without cannibalising advertising revenue
2) people didn’t took it up and they use that as justification to get more advertiser buy in
win/win?
I don’t know, Nick Carr posted about adblock for Mozzilla. I installed it and guess what… i just didn’t notice.
For me unless you do something blatantly annoying i normally block this stuff out anyway