But that's never the end of the story.
Look at Hulu. It started free with ads, them went to paid, no ads, then went to paid with ads and pay more for no ads. When it comes to sources of revenue, it's never this or that, it's this AND that and keep looking for another.
If ads weren't obtrusive and deceptive, I wouldn't feel the need to block them.
Instagram costs around 12€/month if you don't agree to targeted ads (EU).
It's hard to tell, because companies that make their money from ad revenue also spend a lot making their apps more addictive in order to sell you more ads.
You can tell that they are making less than whatever their premium costs though, so for example YouTube makes less than $8/month selling ads.
If people aren't trying to sell you shit, and don't have to make their website more addictive it's relatively cheap to run, for example Wikipedia that has a pretty dynamic read/write load, get 11 billion unique devices a year on just the English site https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/siteviews/?platform=all-sites&source=unique-devices&start=2025-04&end=2026-03&sites=en.wikipedia.org which is about half of the page views: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/01/13/wikipedia-at-25-what-the-data-tells-us/ but spends ~$180m/year across all languages, so it costs about 1c a year/unique device if I'm doing my math right.
Obviously some service like YouTube will cost more because it uses more bandwidth and Gmail will cost more because each user is served individual emails and spam filtering has always been CPU intensive, but the hardware costs are fairly minimal anyway (most of the cost is on staff), so if it wasn't for the ads Google would have less staff and hosting their services would be much cheaper, maybe not 1c/year but almost certainly less than $1
Obviously Lemmy instances are currently much smaller than reddit, but I'd bet by unique user count Lemmy instances are likely running far more effectively than reddit and likely in the sub dollar category.
On the flip side if you want to make something a subscription only service you need to spend a bunch of money processing payments and subscriptions, probably more than the actual hosting costs.
Edit:
Lemmy.world spend ~$2K to serve 14k users a month, which is about 14c/user/month or $1.70/year
It's a question that doesn't have a simple answer (even with publicly available data), but for the individual, it wouldn't be much if the service was decentralized and the burden of hosting is placed on the user or a small community (think about how most game servers work that can host tens or hundreds of players by community members out of a surplus PC or cheap VPS, or something like a forum for a small website), but the issue is once we factor in scale to the equation.
If Youtube became a paid subscription, a majority of the userbase would cease using the platform overnight (and single-pay is outright unsustainable due to the costs of being a hosting platform for video content), and it's more than likely that users would turn to piracy or sharing accounts rather than paying the fee directly.
Windows does have a one time license fee, but their issue is less about monetization and more about monopolistic enshittification. The only cure for that is owning what you buy and not having centralized control, which is only seen in open source/free software platforms such as Linux Distros.
Facebook has the same issue as Youtube to a degree, and largely is sustainable purely due to the network effect brought by the low entry cost of $0 to the user (despite being able to make plenty of money off them through telemetry and ads). A price tag of any sort would break their model as well, along with any other social media platform such as Snapchat.
tl;dr: the only reason the current incumbent platforms are profiting to begin with is because they have a "free but at a hidden cost" as their entire business model, so any price above $0 erases their userbase and relevance, along with being unsustainable for their current infrastructure.
YouTube costs, what, $25 per month to not show ads?
I reckon Facebook and instagram would be in the same range.
Remember that infinite-greed is part of the equation, though..
IF revenue MUST increase, no matter what the cost-to-the-world, THEN .. the example of covid supermarket-profits-skyrocketing, while people couldn't afford food, comes to mind..
That is part of the problem with concentration-of-wealth-archy paradigm & moneyarchy paradigm: they've both got infinities in their goals, that is infinite-concentration-of-wealth, & that breaks civilization's viability.
The 2 equation-classes are incompatible.
Public-benefit-companies are where we ought be, but .. there isn't even that category of incorporation in Canada, ttbomk..
We, globally, have NOT been solving the right problems..
Internet-itself, & social-discussion-forum ought be considered required-civil-infrastructure, removing it from narcissistic-depravity's control, .. but nobody's got the spine to understand that countries are automatically highjacked, otherwise, by the platforms that the country's social-nervous-system is.
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