Welcome to the ad-free internet
personalise ads with a precision that sometimes verges on mind-reading. Its ad-stuffed newsfeed at this time of year embodies the internet’s great trade-off: consumers enjoy free services, but must submit to bombardment with commercials from companies that know who has been naughty or nice. Yet increasingly, those with deep enough pockets are getting the chance to escape the online admen.
Last month Facebook’s owner, Meta, began offering customers in Europe ad-free subscriptions to Facebook and its sister network, Instagram, for €9.99 ($10.85) a month. In October X (formerly Twitter) launched an ad-free option. In the same month TikTok, a fast-growing Chinese-owned video app, announced that it was testing an ad-free subscription.
The following month Snapchat, another social-media rival, said it was doing the same. Social networks are not the only medium allowing the group that advertisers most covet—the better-off with money to splurge—to wriggle beyond their reach. From video and audio to news and gaming, a combination of regulation and technological change is encouraging media companies to offer alternatives.
“We are in a world where it will be increasingly possible to avoid ads," says Brian Wieser of Madison and Wall, an advertising consultancy. As the rich opt out of commercials on some platforms, advertisers are therefore looking for new places to catch them. Grabbing the attention of well-heeled consumers via old media has been getting harder for some time.
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