The Internet is becoming a payment model

The Internet is becoming a payment model

For decades, it was possible to use the Internet free of charge. At least, that was the case in most areas. Now it could be that this tide is turning. Many are asking themselves whether the free online world is about to come to an end.

In the future, the Internet will be a paid model - at least that is the opinion of the experts. The typical social networks of the modern era are leading the way, examples being Twitter, Tiktok and Facebook. These were initially free of charge, but that is now changing more and more. Globally, Meta is considered one of the largest companies working with the most important advertising providers in the world. Facebook, Whatsapp and Instagram belong together. Now a premium model has been developed.

A new success model for the future

A completely new model is to serve as a new source of revenue. Nevertheless, advertising is not to be dispensed with. There is talk of business diversification. So far, the company Meta has made a special effort in this direction. At the moment on Facebook, for example, it is possible as the operator of a group to offer access to various content only for paying users. It works similarly with Instagram and accounts that have a particularly large number of followers. At WhatsApp, an attempt is currently being made to incorporate an alternative to the supermarket.

There are also other social network providers, such as Snapchat and Tiktok, who want to move to direct payments to get away from pure advertising measures. For this, there is the option for a paid subscription, for example. The situation is similar with Twitter. In recent years, a lot of revenue has been lost because better data protection automatically means less revenue via advertising. This has also affected Apple. Those who rely on targeted advertising now have a problem due to improved data protection. That's why the corporations are pursuing a new strategy. One of them is premium offers.

User data as payment

Anyone who wants to continue using the free Internet pays for it with their own private user data. For the customer, this is annoying. In recent decades, it was easy for corporations to tap and collect user data. These were used for targeted advertising. Now the customer has to pay extra for attractive content, even though the data continues to be collected.