Here we are again, another month and what seems like another Meta subscription plan and/or offer. Except this one appears a little different, and it is this subtle difference that confirms my honest opinion that Meta will eventually be forced to ditch its “free” accounts system that has served it for so long…. so first a link to the article and then afterwards I’ll explain my thoughts!
So if you read the article, though it is not mandatory to understand what is going on you’ll see that basically Meta is launching a new subscription service to add premium features to FB, IG and WhatsApp. There is no mention really that ads will disappear either under these plans, so it really is the worst of worlds and options, well it appears like that to me anyway! The reason I think this is a subtle shift is Meta is pitching this as being better than “free” because you get better support, more features but still have the ads to help them monetise things. I honestly think that this is long overdue, I mean make the “free” product poor and get people to pay a subs, then you pretty much instantly weed out 90% of the scammers and bots because there is zero chance they will be paying because then they are traceable/trackable, It also helps satisfy things like legislative powers over age verification because having a paid service pretty much instantly means you have a simple way to stop under 16s from accessing a service because the payments are easily traced… and that can only be a good thing – social media has been a wild west for far too long to be honest! I know I have posted about this a lot here, but the numbers are simply too big to ignore an announcement like this, it is estimated that 3.9 billion people use Meta products on a daily basis!
