For better or worse, more and more social media platforms and messaging apps are going to add paid features. Twitter and Telegram paved the way for adding bonuses to paid users. Now, it looks like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, all under the Meta umbrella, want to get in on it as well, and going as far as setting up a new division to deal with paid features exclusively.
The Verge reports that Meta circulated a memo internally last week, informing its own people of the fact. This new group, called New Monetisation Experiences, will be responsible for identifying and building “possible paid features” for all three of its social media products. The report claims that this new division is being set up as a result of Apple basically nuking ad tracking on iPhones and iPads.
Despite whatever exclusive benefits paid users may get though, escaping ads is not one of them. The report quotes John Hegeman, VP of monetisation at Meta, as saying that the company “is still committed to growing its ads business, and that it had no plans to let people pay to turn off ads”. Which is usually a major, if not primary, feature of a premium tier in a free service, like YouTube Premium for example.
That’s not to say that Facebook, among the others, have not had any form of paid features. With that being said, this usually does not involve the company itself. Instead, it’s more of a thing between users, such as when a group admin charges for exclusive content, or when viewers buy and give “stars” to streamers on the platform. But with the New Monetisation Experiences team, it looks like the company wants to be more involved in transactions that happen on the platform. Not entirely surprising, considering the big hit to its ad business.
(Source: The Verge)
