How Much Would You Pay For an Ad-Free Facebook?

This isn’t really about the whole privacy and data mining fiasco happening with Mark Zuckerberg and his crew at Facebook, but it kind of is. The only reason why Facebook likes to collect so much data about its users is that this data is valuable to advertisers. But what if your Facebook experience removed advertisers from the equation? That’s part of the thinking beyond the possibility of a monthly subscription option that would present you with an ad-free Facebook.

To be fair, I get the suspicion that even if you were to pay for a monthly subscription to remove ads from the popular social network, they’d still be collecting your data. After all, your news feed would still be at the mercy of the algorithm to determine what content to show you, even if it’s not advertising.

But even all of that aside, how much would you be willing to pay to experience a fully ad-free Facebook? To figure that out, we have to first determine how much you are worth to your Zuckerberg overlords.

Based on a recent analysis, Facebook rakes in close to $20 billion from users in the US and Canada alone in 2017. These two countries are far and away the most “valuable” to Facebook. If we look at the entirety of 2017, the ARPU works out to about $85 annually. That works out to right around $7 a month, so that’s how much an ad-free Facebook would cost, right?

Well, not exactly. TechCrunch points out that users who would be willing to pay to remove ads are probably “richer than the average user.” Consequently, they’re also more valuable to advertisers and thus, these users are probably “worth more” than the overall ARPU. Given this, TechCrunch thinks that the monthly fee might need to be in the $11 to $14 range to offset what ad revenue Facebook would earn from these “rich hardcore users.”

That’s more than Spotify, Netflix, Kindle Unlimited, Amazon Prime, Google Drive (1TB) and any number of other popular subscription services. Is that really worth it? Sure, the notion of an ad-free Facebook is understandably appealing. This also explains why “alternative” social media platforms like Vero are ad-free and will be exploring a paid subscription model.

But for now and moving forward, Mark Zuckerberg and his team are dedicated to always providing a free version of Facebook, even if a paid model emerges in the future.