Privacy for a Premium: Exploring People's Sentiments on Paying for Social Media (infographic)

People all over the world have been facing this constant concern for a long time now, whether their data and personal information on social media platforms is safe or not? And whether this data can be misused somehow, as it happened amid the Facebook Cambridge Analytica Scandal?

The other alternative to avoid data usage for the revenue generation of these social media platforms is to pay them through monthly subscriptions.

Twingate carried out a survey and collected data from three sets of people, The Baby Boomers (people born between 1946-1964), Generation X (people born from the 1965-1980s), and the Millennials (people between 1980s-2000s).

According to the study, around 51% of Baby boomers are extremely concerned about the safety of their personal information on social media platforms.

Amongst the extremely concerned people, around 47% of them are from Generation X, and around 44% are the millennials.

3-5% of people in all these groups are not concerned about these things at all.

Another interesting thing that was noted through this survey is that around 44% of people have falsified their information or privacy details on these social media sites.

Distrust on platforms:

The percentage of people who do not trust TikTok is 38%, while 36% of people distrust Facebook.

Only about 13.8% of people have a distrust for LinkedIn, while, for Twitter and YouTube, the percentage reaches 22% - 24%, and for Instagram and Snapchat it is 25% - 26% of total people.

Pinterest and Reddit are still considered better in terms of people’s trust, as the percentage of people distrusting them is 15% - 19%.

71.4% of people prefer free social media experience, which includes the generation of profit through targeted ads using their information. Only 28.6% of people are willing to pay through paid subscriptions to these platforms.

Amongst the people who prefer to pay to these sites to prevent their personal information being sold to third parties, around 63% of people belong to the Generation X category, while almost 60% of people are the millennials, and 50% are the Baby boomers.

The maximum amount users are willing to pay to Facebook is $63.48 annually, and $ 55-62 for Twitter and Instagram respectively, every year, to prevent these platforms from storing and selling personal information.

When reasons, why people would not want to pay for social media, were analyzed, it was noted that around 30% of people from all the three groups could not afford to pay, while 8% -16% of people in these groups think that paying for social media is unconstitutional. And surprisingly, 2%-4% of people in all groups like having targeted ads!

The average revenue these sites generate off users through ads is this:

The monthly ad revenue for Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp is $5.79 billion with 2.89 billion monthly active users globally.

The monthly ad revenue of Reddit is $9.9 billion with 430 million worldwide monthly active users.

Twitter’s average monthly ad revenue is $234 million with 145 million monthly active users.

And lastly, based on this data, it was concluded that the amount these sites need to charge to equal their average monthly ad revenue is way less than the amount people are willing to pay to prevent the future misuse of their personal information.

If Facebook/Instagram needs to charge $2 per user, people are willing to pay $5.24.

Reddit needs to charge $0.02 per user, but people will pay them $4.54.

If Twitter charges $1.6 per user, people will pay $4.75!

Take a look at this infographic for more insights:



Featured photo: Freepik / Sitthiphong

Read next: The Evolution Of Cybersecurity And Data Storage (infographic)
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