According to reports, an internal email sent by Facebook parent company Meta to employees last week showed that Meta is setting up a product team to explore and develop “possible” solutions for applications such as Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp paid features”.
This is Meta’s first serious attempt to develop paid features in major social media apps, all three with billions of users. Meta’s ad business has been hit hard by Apple’s recent tweaks to its ad-tracking capabilities on the iOS platform to protect user privacy and a decline in advertiser spending in the digital ad market.
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The team, called “New Commercialization Experiences,” will be led by Meta’s previous head of research, Pratiti Raychoudhury. In an interview, John Hegeman, the team’s senior leader and Meta’s vice president of commercialization, said that Meta remains committed to growing its advertising business and has no plans to allow users to pay to turn off ads in the app.
“We do see an opportunity to develop new types of products, features, and experiences that people are willing to pay for,” he said, declining to specify what kind of paid features Meta is considering launching.
Currently, almost all of Meta’s revenue comes from advertising, but Meta’s social media apps already offer a handful of paid features. Charging users has not been a priority for the social media giant until now. Hegman believes that paid features are unlikely to become a significant part of the business anytime soon, but he also said, “On the other hand, if there is an opportunity to create new value and generate meaningful revenue, source and driving the diversification of revenue sources, which is obviously an attractive thing.”
He also said that Meta believes that paid features will become a more meaningful part of the business in the long run. “Looking at five years’ time, I do think the paid feature is going to be a game-changer, a significant change.”
Currently, on the Facebook platform, group administrators can charge for some original content, and users can buy virtual “stars” to reward creators. WhatsApp already offers business users the ability to send messages to customers for a fee. Instagram recently announced that creators can charge a subscription fee for original content. In June, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Meta would not take a cut of paid features and subscription deals until 2024.
Over the past few months, social media apps have been exploring how to charge users. TikTok began testing paid subscriptions earlier this year, Twitter already offers a paid Super Follows feature, and Discord generates almost all of its revenue from Nitro paid subscriptions. Additionally, both Telegram and Snapchat have added new paid plans this year that unlock additional features. Snapchat’s paid plans performed well in the early days.
“Obviously, we’re looking at what’s going on in this industry,” Hegman said. “There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in this space. My hope is that, over time, we can learn and emulate.”
