Parmy Olson, Columnist

Paying for YouTube Makes Sense. But Facebook?

A flurry of “paid feature” experiments will never be as lucrative as YouTube’s premium service, which kills the annoying ads.

September 8, 2022 at 4:00 AM UTC

By Parmy Olson

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.”

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Photographer: Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty Images

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Meta Platforms Inc. has become the latest social media giant to tinker with the idea of selling premium features as part of its service, according to a report in The Verge. Having been free for years, it wants to see if any of us will pay for new widgets in Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp.

That’s going to be a hard sell.