According to the BBC, Meta may offer an ad free experience on Facebook and Instagram in the UK… but for a fee.
Meta’s argument is that no one should be expected to offer their platforms for free, if you’re not paying for use then the quid pro quo is that they serve you ads and that’s where the vast amount of Meta’s income is derived.
Frankly, personally I’ve almost stopped using Facebook anyway due to the sheer number of promoted pages they flooded my feed with earlier this year. No I’m not interested in news sites from Australia, Star Wars, Dad Jokes or Woman’s World, just some of the pages I blocked before I got fed up and simply stopped logging into Facebook. But the real question is are these even considered as ads, because if they’re not then paying to block ads would be a waste of time.
But, I’ve got to ask would I pay to use Facebook? I’m not so sure that the €5.99 it costs to block ads in the EU is worth it. I’d love to say it was, but I can probably live without a constant flood of garbage on my Facebook feed and then discovering that updates from some of my closest friends haven’t appeared and I have to go hunting specifically to see if they’ve posted anything interesting lately.
Net result, most of my close friends know I probably won’t see their Facebook posts and message me directly when they’ve something to share. That doesn’t cost anything and I don’t have to wade through ads to keep in touch.
Don’t get me wrong, I do get that Facebook need to make money and that means ads, but in their rush to show me content they think I should be interested in they have totally missed the mark and aren’t showing me content I think I’m interested in.
Next steps for Facebook will be figuring out how to get consent from all users who want to carry on using their platform for free and don’t sign up to an ad free experience. They will have to demonstrate that users freely give their consent to personalised advertising, if they move to a consent or pay model in the future.
