If you're not paying for a product (the full price), then you are the product.

If you're not paying for the product, and you aren't the product, you're in the start-up phase and just eating the bait. And man, people have been eating a lot of bait.

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JKCalhoun 16 hours ago | parent [-]

These days it's no surprise when you are both paying for the product and are the product as well.

A lot of us learned this when cable television arrived—you paid for it, but no commercials…until there were.

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Workaccount2 15 hours ago | parent [-]

It's true, but many services nowadays (if not most) offer an ad-free service at full price.

People confuse "ad-subsidized" with "I pay and still see ads". They're not the same thing.

And market studies show that people overwhelmingly prefer ads over payments.

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array_key_first 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Those market studies are worthless because consumers don't know what is actually going on. They don't know what data is collected, where it's used, and they can't opt out.

Obviously if you lie to consumers you can get them to 'prefer' your product.

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knollimar 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Do market studies show that people prefer ad subsidized with payments over payments?

	▲	keeda 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not sure about market studies, but I don't think the data is going to be very encouraging for this case either. E.g. in early 2024 Amazon introduced ads in Prime Video, which people were already paying for. I couldn't find more recent data, but from this source at least it seems growth hasn't stalled much: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/amazon-prime-video-stati... This is not a clear cut example because Prime comes with a lot of other benefits which is a confounding factor. Might be worth looking at cable TV subscription numbers after they introduced ads, but I couldn't find any data with a quick search.