Dearest readers, if you read my last article (or skimmed through it), you may have noticed I used an example of Marketing jobs because I know some people who work at different levels in this industry. I find Marketing to be a very interesting field because many online platforms allow businesses (and individuals) to do affordable targeted mass advertising, which in turn allowed the rise and thriving of many different businesses and entire new sub-sectors. Good for the economy, right? Well, not if you ask a growing number of people who don't like seeing ads everywhere and who are worried about their private information being used by advertisers to target them more effectively. I have written an article before where I claimed that us as individuals with paychecks are still in charge and marketing platforms don't rule us, not everyone agrees. For those who disagree and don't want ads, it is however very difficult to explain how Internet will exist then. I asked Marketing people about this and they said that, without ads, we would have to go back to the subscription model of online services; it means you pay for every service you use. How much might that be? How acceptable would this monthly cost be to people? Let's have a look.
First, we need to determine how much it would cost per month to use the most typical online services. I'll add it up in Canadian dollars which is easy enough to convert online to any other currency if you need to do that :)
How much is that to people? Is it expensive or cheap? Depends on who you ask. The average annual full-time salary in Toronto, according to Payscale, is $59,187. Net take-home pay is $44,862. $908.76 would then account for 2.03% of that. It may not seem like much percentage-wise, but let's take a look at what else in our lives might cost as much. It's somewhat possible to eat healthy spending $75.73 per week if you focus on cooking and and getting calorie and macronutrient dense foods. On the other hand, you could do 1-2 takeouts per week, or 1 food delivery per week, at $75.73 per month. If you like Starbucks coffee, you can take a break with one in your hand every day for less than that amount. If you're lucky, you can get away with that amount being your monthly uBer budget. On the other half, it amount to approximately half of the TTC Metropass cost. Needless to say, many people would have to make more hard choices on top of hard choices they are already making. They also constitute the majority of the people who use ad-supported services today, and the majority of people who allowed these services to reach critical user mass and become the giants that they are today.
There we have it, dearest readers. Would you be willing to pay the price of making ads go away?
First, we need to determine how much it would cost per month to use the most typical online services. I'll add it up in Canadian dollars which is easy enough to convert online to any other currency if you need to do that :)
- YouTube: Like YouTube but not the ads? The premium ad-free experience with a few additional perks is $11.99 per month. Now imagine, in our scenario, that the ad-supported YouTube didn't exist and it was $11.99 per month or you don't get to use it. Hmmm.
- Facebook: If you want to have your own website and some sort of a directory to look up if your friends, family, local businesses and anyone else has a page too, if you want to join fan and discussion groups, and also have a chat, audio and video call service, that's what Facebook is in a nutshell, from an average user's perspective. I found a few articles that mentioned Facebook would do well to charge for an ad-free experience at $11 per month. Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly said that Facebook has no plans to do this; one would guess it's because people's data and the marketing platform on Facebook bring in a much higher revenue. Now, companies like Wix charge around $11 per month for the most basic website. You don't get a search directory, messages audio and video chat, etc. So, $14.99 per month would be a minimum of sorts.
- Email: Email could still be free. If you have a home or business internet connection, you typically get one or more free email accounts you can use on all of your devices. They have to be manually configured on each device, including setting up how often it syncs up with devices, whether you do push notifications or not, and yes you need to back up all of your emails if you ever want to change your Internet company. What happens if you only have a data plan on your smartphone or tablet? In that case, you would need a premium ad-free email service. Outlook is a good example. Microsoft bundles Office 365 and Outlook Premium; a personal use subscription is $69.99 per year, or $5.83 per month.
- Spotify: Let's say you don't want to have just YouTube Premium, but you also want something like Spotify for your media consumption. Well, it's $9.99 per month.
- Netflix: Yes, we pay for Netflix already, but we need to include it on this list so we can have a more accurate monthly total cost of subscription services if you didn't like ads, or ad-supported model didn't exist. Mine is $16.99 per month.
- Maps: It's very difficult (at least for me) to try and figure out how much most of the Waze or Google Maps Services (maps, navigation, traffic updates) would cost if they weren't ad-supported. Nevertheless, I doubt it would be less than $4.99 per month (your thoughts?).
- Photo editing: This one is used by both guys and girls, but more so by girls to the best of my knowledge and experience. In the app-centric world of today, we often edit our pics with Instagram and Snapchat filters in order to enhance them. Both of these platforms are ad-supported. If they weren't, you would have to learn how to use and embrace something along the lines of Adobe's Creative Suite for photography at the price of around $13.99 per month.
- Cloud storage: Let's face it, most of us got hooked on using cloud storage to manage (and collaborate on) photos, documents and other files across multiple devices. Popular options are iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox etc. Without direct or indirect ad support, you would be looking at around $2.79 per month (cost of cheapest Google Drive premium plans).
How much is that to people? Is it expensive or cheap? Depends on who you ask. The average annual full-time salary in Toronto, according to Payscale, is $59,187. Net take-home pay is $44,862. $908.76 would then account for 2.03% of that. It may not seem like much percentage-wise, but let's take a look at what else in our lives might cost as much. It's somewhat possible to eat healthy spending $75.73 per week if you focus on cooking and and getting calorie and macronutrient dense foods. On the other hand, you could do 1-2 takeouts per week, or 1 food delivery per week, at $75.73 per month. If you like Starbucks coffee, you can take a break with one in your hand every day for less than that amount. If you're lucky, you can get away with that amount being your monthly uBer budget. On the other half, it amount to approximately half of the TTC Metropass cost. Needless to say, many people would have to make more hard choices on top of hard choices they are already making. They also constitute the majority of the people who use ad-supported services today, and the majority of people who allowed these services to reach critical user mass and become the giants that they are today.
There we have it, dearest readers. Would you be willing to pay the price of making ads go away?