Does paid-for Facebook and Instagram signal end of free-access orthodoxy?

theguardian.com:

Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire is built on billions of users – and the advertisers who pay vast sums to grab their attention.

But that business model is under pressure on several fronts. It is against this backdrop that Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, said on Sunday it is trialling subscriptions for both social media platforms.

“Advertising has paid for editorial content and other things for centuries,” says Johnny Ryan, a senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and a campaigner for stronger protection of internet users’ data. “I do not see that changing. But the tracking-based ads that snoop on our every move are the historical anomaly, and they are on the way out.”

Facebook and Instagram offer a goldmine of user data for advertisers. Facebook alone has 2 billion daily users, while across all of Meta’s platforms including Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger the total is just under 3 billion. Facebook generates revenue from building profiles of those users and matching them with advertisers, who direct ads at people targeting their specific interests and background.

This advertising-based model accounted for 98% of Meta’s $116.6bn in revenues last year, but it faces problems. In 2021, Apple introduced privacy changes that required apps sold on the Apple store to ask users permission to track their activity across other apps and the internet – a key means of gathering data for targeted adverts. Of course, many users have opted not to be tracked, and Meta warned that the change would reduce its 2022 ad revenue by $10bn.

Regulators loom as well. Last month Meta’s business model was dealt a blow by a ruling that the company’s legal justification for targeting users with personalised ads broke EU