Kind of funny, given how desperately gun manufacturers try to blame video games for gun violence. Honestly, I'm surprised this kind of thing doesn't happen more often. I mean if the oil industry is using Fortnight to reach younger audiences, it makes sense that gun companies would target people who play shooters.
It is, and it doesn’t, but one of the important functions of journalism is a public accounting of details such as these and engendering conversation thereof.
A top U.S. gun maker signed a previously undisclosed deal to put one of its rifles in the popular videogame franchise Call of Duty as part of a marketing plan to reach young customers, according to internal emails and company records.
I mean, it’s bad, but it’s not nearly the worst of the firearms industry’s sins. Look up the Bushmaster ‘Man Card’ ads - Really outlines how the confluence of toxic masculinity and gun culture is a key factor in the prevalence of school shootings in the states.
Yeah, pretty much. But of course, they deny culpability because “It’s not like we pulled the trigger” or some other limp-wrist bullshit excuse.
If gun lobbyists hadn’t pushed for a ban on the CDC studying gun violence under the pretense that the data would be construed as advocating for gun control, maybe some of those kids at Uvalde, or Sandy Hook, or any of the other hundreds if not thousands of school shootings over the last 20+ years might still be alive today.
The proposal is a gambit by Meta to navigate European Union rules that threaten to restrict its ability to show users personalized ads without first seeking user consent—jeopardizing its main source of revenue.
It would give users the choice between continuing to access Instagram and Facebook free with personalized ads, or paying for versions of the services without any ads, people familiar with the proposal said.
Under the plan, Meta has told regulators it would charge users roughly €10 a month, equivalent to about $10.50, on desktop on a Facebook or Instagram account, and roughly €6 for each additional linked account, the people said. On mobile devices the price would jump to roughly €13 a month because Meta would factor in commissions charged by Apple’s and Google’s app stores on in-app payments.
Privacy-conscious users in the U.S. shouldn’t expect to be offered the option to pay for ad-free Instagram or Facebook soon. Meta’s proposals have been pitched specifically as a way to navigate demands by EU regulators to seek consent before crunching user data to select highly personalized ads.
It isn’t clear if regulators in Ireland or Brussels will deem the new plan compliant with EU laws, or whether they will insist Meta offer cheaper or even free versions with ads that aren’t personalized based on a user’s digital activity.
This feels like Meta is just attempting to play at Malicious Compliance. There’s no way they make that much off each user per month, this feels like they are intentionally making it cost-prohibitive to have the ad-free version just so they can say they are meeting EU regulations. I certainly cannot see many users shelling out ~€17 a month for Instagram and Facebook.
As noted, though, this may not be enough to pass the EU regulations.
in 2022, advertising revenue amounted to close to 113 billion U.S. dollars whereas payments and other fees revenues amounted to around two billion U.S. dollars.
With roughly three billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2023, Facebook is the most used online social network worldwide.
113/3 = about $38 per user per year
14*12 = $168 per user per year
Which would be a mark-up (a Zuck-up?) of 342%.
You do have to figure though, that it’s only the most active users who will opt to pay $14/month, and it’s those same highly-active users that contribute the most to the ad revenue.
Having no idea how those stats actually break down, we could take a wild guess and do a Pareto Principle 80/20.
Say the top 20% active users constitute 80% of the ad revenue, and those same top 20% all switch to the paid model:
(1130.8)/(30.2) = about $151 per VIP user per year
…which is a lot closer to the $168. Zuck-up of about 11%.
80/20 is probably cutting them too much slack, but the real markup is probably closer to 11% than it is to 342%.
This is also not factoring the extra operational expense of supporting the new model.
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Math part over, here’s my take:
This is good.
Ad-based models are toxic. We poisoned our culture, bulldozed our privacy, distorted the economy, gave unfathomable power to immature narcissistic opportunists, and underdeveloped public FOSS tech because we expected privately-owned services to be Free™ even though they could never be literally free.
This is a move towards unmasking these services and revealing the real economic gears whizzing around behind them.
The more people understand what their privacy and autonomy is worth to these companies, the more they might insist on keeping it — and maybe even seek out places where they don’t have to pay for the privilege.
This is not good. I don’t get how people still have good faith in big business. Here’s what’s going to happen, we will be moving towards a pay for service WITH ads. And data mining.
It’s not one or the other here. People somehow think it’s either a) “pay for the service” OR b) “have your personal data raped and parcelled out to the highest bidder.” It’s not. It’s not either a or b, it’s either b or a AND b.
So I have to pay to be tracked?
And you know once everyone acclimates to the new pricing, it’s going to be “hey we are adding a new plan for $9 that has ads and all the telemetry. Oh, we are also raising the rates.”
The real problem is the entire company is rotten. I don’t understand why people think a pay wall won’t make that the case.
Good to note that this isn’t even hypothetical, it literally happened with cable. First it was ad-funded, then you paid to get rid of ads, then you paid exorbitant prices to get fed ads, and the final evolution was being required to pay $100+ for bundles including channels you’d never use to get at the one you would. It’s already happening to streaming services too, which have started to bundle.
wsj.com
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