Excited to pay

It’s possible to live in a world without ads.

This is hard coming from someone who makes ads on a weekly basis. Advertising has it’s place but it also has it’s limitations. The business model works, and if you have the goods, it pays well but I can’t shake what happened today.

I was excited to pay for YouTube Premium which has finally arrived in Canada. I was giddy watching payment go through, I would have paid twice as much for it.

YouTube earned this excitement with it’s amazing platform, relevant recommendations, and contrary to what some parents believe, a ton of educational content that we no longer have to watch with ads.

We talk about social media addiction, bad incentives for tech companies and executives but maybe the answer has been starting at us in the face all along. Why not just pay for services that provide us value.

I haven’t put a number to what I would pay for Google per year but it’s in the thousands. I am lucky to afford that, and it would be easy for me to part with those dollars. Facebook and Instagram would be much lower, likely in the small hundreds.

Am I the only one? How much would you pay for Google and Facebook?