Sure. Like I said, some people bought it and then disabled ads, and that's cool. Some people even bought it and left the ads, that was even cooler! But a lot of people, people who directly said, "I will pay you if you let me remove the ads", did not.

Then that tells you that the content you are providing isn't worth much.

I think I said as much above. That most people don't get the same value that the advertisers do.

So, how much ad money does each user actually bring you? 5€ doesn’t seem like a realistic price.

According to https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/6pxyvy/traffic_pag..., about half of your users are mobile users of the official app, which does not support ad blocking, so at least half of your entire userbase either pays for gold, or has ads. Official statistics you’ve published put reddit at a reach of 6% of US internet users, which would be over 234 million users.

This would mean 117 million monthly users at 4 USD pre-tax each, which would be a monthly revenue that’d rival Google or Facebook. And this is completely ignoring any and all desktop users. So either your user statistics are wrong, or you don’t even get close to the 4 USD revenue per user in ads.

Based on the fact that Reddit officially isn’t profitable, and has 230 employees paid at Silicon Valley wages, and assuming reddit has a factor of 10 less users (so ~11 million mobile users per month, which would assume half of the subscribers to AskReddit would be active mobile users), the actual money you’d get per mobile user per month via ads (again, assuming all desktop users use adblock), would be around $0.21. This also matches much more closely the usual per-user ad revenue statistics.

And $0.21 per month is a price that also is a lot more affordable for people outside of silicon valley. Even a buck a month is still within of affordable range, although less so if you use many different sites. If you visit hundreds of pages per month, paying $4 each would bankrupt people. And no, you don’t get the same revenue via ads either (as explained above, or can be determined via the simple equation that the entire revenue sites you’re visiting make from ads has to be less than the disposable income you spend on products per month).

> Official statistics you’ve published put reddit at a reach of 6% of US internet users, which would be over 234 million users.

The population of the U.S. is about 320 million, including children and non internet users, so how can 6% of US internet users equate to over 234 million users?

> The population of the U.S. is about 320 million, including children and non internet users, so how can 6% of US internet users equate to over 234 million users?

Reddit operates in many countries, but the data Reddit published on their blog a few months ago named both of these numbers. Which is... interesting.

I don't think it tells them that. There is not much incentive to provide any vendor with a special altruistic dispensation when you're already getting the desired experience at no cost. This is the case regardless of the value or importance of the experience provided.

The simple fact is that if people don't have to pay for something, most of them won't. And that makes plenty of sense.

Or, and that’s the other option, if you can get the same offering at a lower cost.

For example, for me, as a user, IRCCloud is far too expensive, because for half the monthly cost I can run a Quassel core (an open IRC bouncer with similar functionality) for 10 users.

So, to me, I have a choice between 4 bucks a month for a product, or 0.20 bucks a month for the same product.

A big issue with this are the silicon valley wages. Most of these services are priced for users in Silicon Valley, where 5 bucks a month are nothing.

But out in the rest of the world, money is worth a lot more, and as a result, the entire cost/use equation changes, making many of these products impossible to afford.