At first sight, it seems like “freemium” might be the answer. Have an ordinary Facebook/Youtube account for free, full of ads; or pay $25 for an ad-free experience. Now you can have both, and on the same network.
Unfortunately, there seem to be two big problems with this. First, companies love to double-dip! Having paying customers is good, but having paying customers and showing them ads and selling their private data is even better! When you have captured the market by network effect, you only need to make the experience of the paying customers slightly less horrible in order to extract money from them. Which you can achieve simply by making the experience of non-paying customers slightly more horrible. (If people are willing to pay to remove 6-second ads, they will probably also pay to reduce 15-second ads to 6-second ads.)
Second, the people willing to pay, especially for something so trivial like having a somewhat more pleasant online experience, are exactly the ones that your clients want to advertize to. (The 6-second ads displayed to people who already paid to reduce their ad exposure are probably way more profitable than the 6-second ads previously displayed to non-paying people.) It’s like being blackmailed for money; your willingness to pay only makes you a more juicy target the next time.
At first sight, it seems like “freemium” might be the answer. Have an ordinary Facebook/Youtube account for free, full of ads; or pay $25 for an ad-free experience. Now you can have both, and on the same network.
Unfortunately, there seem to be two big problems with this. First, companies love to double-dip! Having paying customers is good, but having paying customers and showing them ads and selling their private data is even better! When you have captured the market by network effect, you only need to make the experience of the paying customers slightly less horrible in order to extract money from them. Which you can achieve simply by making the experience of non-paying customers slightly more horrible. (If people are willing to pay to remove 6-second ads, they will probably also pay to reduce 15-second ads to 6-second ads.)
Second, the people willing to pay, especially for something so trivial like having a somewhat more pleasant online experience, are exactly the ones that your clients want to advertize to. (The 6-second ads displayed to people who already paid to reduce their ad exposure are probably way more profitable than the 6-second ads previously displayed to non-paying people.) It’s like being blackmailed for money; your willingness to pay only makes you a more juicy target the next time.