The social media giant, Meta, plans to offer Facebook and Instagram services within the European region, for a monthly subscription.
According to the American newspaper "The New York Times", Meta is currently studying those plans in which financial subscriptions will be in exchange for blocking ads, while maintaining financial profits by launching a revenue model based on monthly subscriptions.
It is noteworthy that Meta had announced, in early August, its plans to present a notice to obtain prior approval from users of its social platforms in Europe, with regard to advertisements, and that decision came as part of the company’s attempts to calm Europe’s fears of violating the privacy of users, in addition to complying with the request of the Commission Irish Data Protection, updates Meta's policies on the use of data in targeted advertising, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Data Protection Commission in Ireland imposed two fines on Meta because of the Europeans’ data, the first in January with a value of $400 million, for the company’s mishandling of the data of its users of its platforms, and the second in May, with a value of $1.3 billion, for transferring Europeans’ data to the company’s servers in the United States.
The Meta plan, regarding a monthly subscription in exchange for the services of its platforms, is part of a long-term strategy to shift more towards a business model that relies on paid services and benefits, rather than reliance on ads.
John Hegemann, vice president of profitability at Meta, announced in an interview with The Verge last year that the company is looking at a range of opportunities aimed at building new experiences, benefits and products that encourage users to pay for them, without giving details about These products, however, set a time frame of up to the next 5 years that will witness a shift in Meta's business model, which is expected to rely more on paid benefits.
But in the same context, Hegemann focused on the company's commitment to its plans based on making profits in the first place from ads, and has no plans to enable users to obtain an ad-free experience in exchange for a sum of money.
For many years, social media platforms did not depend on paid benefits, and ads were always their first source of income, but with the entry of American billionaire Elon Musk into the market by acquiring the X platform, the winds of change blew.
Since the acquisition in November, Musk has expanded the scope of the paid version of the service XBlue, formerly "Twitter Blue", to offer a wide range of benefits to individuals and companies, on top of which is account verification, along with various tools for publishing content that are not available in the free version of the service, which is what prompted companies like Meta to roll out their paid service, Meta Verified.
Meta also provides the advantage of buying virtual stars to support content makers, in addition to WhatsApp allowing companies and merchants to reach their target audience in exchange for paying monthly subscriptions, and Instagram currently provides periodic subscriptions, through which content makers can obtain direct financial compensation.
Despite all these paid tools and benefits, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and director of Meta, announced last June that the company will not obtain a percentage of any financial operations that take place within its applications until 2024.