Are those the only options?

How about paying once, owning a specific version and that's it?

Not great for a chat app, which needs ongoing active servers and someone to fix stuff that breaks, even if you feature-freeze it.

Pretty great for a chat app used by a few billion people, a few $billion is enough to keep things running for many decades. e.g. banks do exactly this, with much more critical and complicated infra.

How do banks do this?

Don't banks also charge a monthly fee?

That works for software, but not as well for services like YouTube

Even for software practice has shown few are actually willing to pay hundreds to thousands for a lifetime license. And you still need to purchase service packs, etc

As we have all learned, ad and subscription models aren't mutually exclusive. You can still get ads while paying for a subscription.

In fact, I don't believe the ad model would have gone away if everyone started paying for a subscription. The bottom tier would still be filled with ads.

Ideally, the market would solve this. The companies that are pushing annoying would lose customers to the companies that don't. But since we don't live in a ideal world, I honestly think regulations would be the only way. Something like "If a customer pays for subscription in any way, you can't show ads" - and then let the companies put a realistic price to their subscription tiers, which makes it worthwhile for them.

Ad subsidized subscriptions are cheaper.

I don't see what people find so grating about having a ad-load/cost spectrum. Maybe it's just confusion about the billing model.

They are cheaper until they aren’t. The neat thing about a plan that removes all ads is that you can just add the ads again later and introduce yet another, even more expensive plan that removes the ads again. Such fun! Much profit!

I pay for 2 streaming services. They include annoying ads and the only way to avoid ads is, yeah to just pay more. No sense at all.

That makes perfect sense actually, you pay them half of the ad revenue to get rid of half the ads.

Perfect sense. Later, we pay to get ride of 90% of the ads to still have ads everywhere. Then 99% and on.

It's totally possible to have the ad model without all the spying. It's just that marketers don't want that to be an option. They're all in on spying on us.

Yes, it's possible for marketers to act contrary to their own interests. Is that really your point?

My point is that the problem isn't really advertising, it's the spying.

As smart TVs, cable TV and streaming services show, even things that people generally pay for will get the ad model given enough time.

> Because people collectively vote for the ad model over the subscription model

You make it sound as if those were the only two options available..

Right, I left out the donation model because less than 1% of users ever actually donate anything. It's hardly worth even considering for vast majority of businesses.

Were we even given a choice? In most cases, no.

people didn't vote for shit, if they could vote they'd vote for no ads and no cost. companies like google destroyed this option on purpose. there is no reason why the vast majority of apps and services online can't be both free and ad free. if i look for tetris on the app store it's literally impossible to find a version that's both ad free and free of purchases despite the fact that i know there's at minimum 100 options that fit this criteria. google/apple just buries them and deliberately doesnt allow filtering to find them

>there is no reason why the vast majority of apps and services online can't be both free and ad free

You can give away software, but running a service costs money. P2p messaging can be free (and signal exists), but nothing like free and adless YouTube or Facebook is going to happen regardless whether google or meta do anything to prevent it.

The Saudis would love to have a platform as popular as YouTube for their image washing purposes, no matter if it costs them a cool $billion or two per year to keep it ad-free. They don't do it because they'd rather not antagonize Google, a company wielding global power, otherwise they'd love to.

there are tons of free mastadon servers that cost nothing to end users and perfectly capture the functionality of twitter/facebook/whatever. yes there is root cost at its core, but its distributed across people who volunteer to pay for it on smaller scales becasue they enjoy running those services.

agreed its trickier when its gets to stuff like youtube, but piracy being free and widely spread is an example of how its possible, just not well developed right now

there's also options where it's pay-as-you-go with stuff like bitcoin (e.g. i pay $0.01 to watch a video) where it's effectively free but on large scale does cover the costs of infra

As much as I despise ads, this is a pretty delusional take. Mastodon was only possible because of the hard work of open source contributors with day jobs that feed them. Running and accessing these instances requires all sorts of costly infrastructure that doesn’t materialise out of the blue. And finally, there may be a handful of geeks that enjoy paying for hosting, but that only works as long as it’s a niche community. Introduce 2 billion users, and it becomes just plain impossible.

And as you cite piracy as an alternative: that’s not "free" as in software, that’s "free" as in freeloading. Someone else is paying for it, just not you. That might work to fulfil your own needs, but it’s not a viable solution for business models.

i think you're missing the point. my point is that free software exists, and i recognize that the people who build it arent paying the bills with it. i'm saying there's no logistical reason why the vast majority of software people use cant be open source even with this being the case - it's capitalist pressures that suppress its visibility and therefore adoption.

my point with torrenting is that people offer their bandwidth for free without any real incentive to do so. if there was more systemic open source adoption and awareness of how systems like this work well when people make token donations (like with bandwidth) then i think we could be fine.

I have no idea how in the world you think that could ever work in a general sense.

Things require labor. Labor costs money. Ergo, people giving you stuff require money, somehow. A tetris clone requires so little labour, that a well-off person with too much time (ergo labor) on their hands can give you that for free, but that's not scalable for 99% of important stuff.

Because capitalism, they also require more money, YoY, than last year, meaning they can't just make a steady stream of profit. They need more profit every year.