Would you pay to use Instagram?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more. When was the last time you really looked at your kettle, your umbrella, the hallway mirror, or even a gravestone? Every one of them was designed by someone for a reason. And those choices are still shaping how you live. The ordinary isn't ordinary at all. That's by design with me, Anthony Burke. Find it on the ABC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.
If there's one word you're guaranteed to hear more and more often, it's clanker. A term borrowed from Star Wars. It's fast becoming the internet's catch-all for robots, autonomous machines, and AI in general. And it's been a rough week or so for the clankers. Drones have fallen into Sydney Harbour, humanoid robots have stumbled through public demos, and we are glued to our tiny handheld screens watching it all. So why do we find robot fails so entertaining? My name is Ray Johnston and welcome to download this show on ABC Radio National.
Now joining me to unpack some of the biggest stories in tech right now is Seamus Byrne, tech researcher and PhD candidate with the ADMS. Seamus, welcome back. Yeah, good to be here. And Josh Taylor, technology reporter for The Guardian Australia. Welcome back, Josh.
Great to be back with you.
Now, Meta has officially launched subscription tiers across Instagram and Facebook and WhatsApp, adding premium features for users willing to pay a monthly fee. Seamus, take me through the paid tier features. What what would we be paying for exactly?
That's actually a more complicated question than you would think. We have a WhatsApp Plus, we have a Facebook Plus, we have an Instagram Plus, and then that's not even touching on the other Meta One AI offerings that they've also been introducing. But the key ones that I think most people are going to care a lot about is Instagram Plus. And so on that one, we're seeing things like extending story expiring. Stories, creating multiple story audiences, so actually being able to split up who might see your stories. Even tricky things like previewing stories, which basically means you can look at stories but not actually let the person see that you have seen the story. Separate from special creator program things that are also happening, but then over on WhatsApp, you get things like premium students.
Stickers, pinning chats, uh premium ringtones, like so it's so much of it is like just little fluffy extras, like new app icons to choose from. So just it does feel like a lot of fluffy extras for people who usually sing so much, they're like, yeah, give me gimme more stuff in that.
Let let me do all the extra bonus things. And and Josh, h how much are we going to be paying for this if we want all those little extra bonus things?
Yeah, I mean they've said that the uh Instagram Plus and Facebook Plus will cost about US three ninety-nine each and WhatsApp plus will be about two ninety-nine US a month. Um uh Seamus mentioned the meta one thing, which will potentially be a bundling of some of those things. So you sort of see Apple already doing with its products. The price may vary. Obviously, the Apple and Google taxes that they put on top of these things might mean that if you're paying for it in App, it's slightly more expensive.
What is the premise of the episode and why are “clankers” being discussed?
And obviously the conversion rate I mean it's probably slightly different, but that's sort of the base level that we're working on at the moment. It's it's not a huge amount uh of of money per month, but whether people want to be handing over money to the to Meta to keep using their services is another thing entirely, I guess.
Yeah, I think it I think it strikes me as a as a little bit amusing uh considering the the the kind of unspoken contract that we have with social media platforms is we will use this service for free. You're going to take all of our data in return and sell it to advertisers and that's how you're gonna make money. And now there is the added complication in a sense that We will be paying Meta directly and Meta will still presumably be making money from our data. Th there's no there's no option in this subscription to say, Well, you you can't harvest my information anymore.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–3:51
2
What is the premise of the episode and why are “clankers” being discussed?
3:51–10:55
3
What new premium subscription tiers has Meta launched for Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp?
10:55–20:15
4
How much will Instagram Plus and Facebook Plus cost users and what features do they include?
20:15–28:58
5
Will paying for Meta’s Plus subscriptions actually reduce the number of ads we see?
28:58–29:04