Social media marketing can be achieved on countless networks around the internet, but the networks that most marketers show interest in are Twitter and Facebook. They are used all over the globe, and both have their own unique advantages for marketers, both online and on mobile. Facebook, however, offers a lot more opportunity to advertisers than Twitter does, due to their constant dedication to making marketing on their network effective. With the constant, enormous amount of traffic that Facebook gets, it is a perfect place to place an ad that will get a lot of people to see it. But, that brings to question just how these Facebook users feel about the advertisements they see every day when they log in to their favorite social network. Many have studied how Facebook users react to Facebook Marketing, but a writer at MarketingLand has taken a slightly different approach to finding an accurate answer to the question.
Greg Sterling, the writer mentioned above, conducted an online survey out of pure curiosity, and just as he did, I felt I was obliged to share the results. The question he asked in his survey was, “How much would you pay to remove all the ads in your Facebook account?” Now, I always thought that advertisements annoyed people on the internet, but apparently the times have changed and people have started to embrace the advertising they see everywhere they browse.
The majority at 89.7% said that they would not pay anything because they do not mind the ads showing up on their Facebook pages. The most reasonable price listed was $9.99, and only 4.5% said that they would pay it each year to get rid of the ads. 3.4% said they would pay $99.99 yearly to rid their page of ads. For $29.99, 1.5% of respondents would pay to have ads removed, and for $49.99, .9% would pay for no more Facebook ads. So, to sum up the results, most people do not mind Facebook ads, and there are some people who hate them a bit too much.
If there were a similar appetite for an ad-free version of Facebook globally (10 percent at $9.99 per year this time) the company could make something like $979 million annually. Admittedly it’s extremely unlikely that 10 percent of Facebook’s entire global user base would opt in to a paid-subscription plan.
However this exercise argues there is some meaningful demand — and therefore some serious money — potentially out there for an ad-free subscription offering from Zuckerberg and Co.
Facebook could definitely make a lot of money off of an ad free version of Facebook, but the numbers above show that though there may be a demand, it isn’t a large one. People don’t mind Facebook ads, because Facebook has a clean and simple advertising platform, and most of the ads tend to be beneficial to Facebook users. These numbers just explain further how Facebook is quite a reliable platform for marketing, even if 10% of those surveyed have a problem with it. Facebook’s traffic will be consistent, and it is safe to assume the network will remain as one version.
