Ads are a sneaky and dishonest way to get at your end users' money. It's a lie that with ads you give your content for free:
1. The advertisers who pay you get their money from us, added to the prices of the things we buy. There is no free lunch.
2. The overhead cost of advertising is huge and we pay for that too.
3. We pay the opportunity cost of a product that cannot put users first because you live or die by giving advertisers what they want (and what we want indirectly and secondarily). This includes both the cost of lost privacy as well as business, editorial and design decisions that optimize for advertising revenue. As has been said, you are using us as products more than treating us as your paying customers. Let me restate to be extra clear: WE are the paying customer, but we don't look like that to your finance department.
4. We pay for all the collateral damage of advertising, such as the tremendous amount of link-bait and other garbage that advertising perversely incentivizes.
5. We pay the social costs. Democracy and the free market assume people make voting and purchasing decisions based on facts and reason. Advertising undermines democracy[1] and the free market[2]. Advertising is predominantly about manipulation and deceit. I believe this is the most expensive cost of content that relies on advertising revenue.
Added together, we end users are paying a lot more for "free" product than if we could just straight up pay you. And even we non-users are paying the social costs and collateral damage.
[1] Do you really need a link for this one? We all know that money often overwhelmingly decides who gets to run in an election, plays a big part in who wins, and influences what legislation they introduce, support or fight.
Soundcloud already has a pro plan which I see a lot of artists using. Why do they need ads? Do you they not already make enough money?
It's not the specifics of what is being proposed here that bothers me. But something about this makes me feel that this will be soundclouds downfall. I don't want to be soundclouds product. I want soundcloud to be the product. I would happily pay for their service (providing they don't go down this route).
(I'm a bedroom producer that uploads to soundcloud, considering a pro plan)
>Why do they need ads? Do you they not already make enough money?
last I checked, they were a for-profit business. If they believe they can make more money (and thus: profits) by playing ads, that's what they do.
As a for-profit business, it's totally within their rights to gain as much money as they can and they have zero obligations to only have the best of the end-users in mind.
Of course, as ads become more and more intrusive, people might switch to a competitor with fewer/no ads, or they might convert to paid accounts, but assessing that risk, too, is Soundcloud's problem.
My guess is that they feel they are popular enough now to be able to add ads and still be able to keep their user base because Soundcloud is where the artists are (which happened because they had a huge audience, mostly because they had no ads up to now)
I don't want ads.
I don't want you to give me ad revenue.
Just take my money and respect my privacy. Is that really so much to ask.
I will happily pay someone a yearly subscription for a simple social network that respects users privacy.