Paid social: Meta could be trying a new business model in Europe

9/3/23 8:00PM

Paid social‍

‍Meta is considering introducing paid versions of Facebook and Instagram for European users, giving them access to endless ad-free scrolling. The move is largely in response to the bloc’s increasingly stringent policies on data collection, which has limited the company's ability to deliver targeted advertisements in the region — you know, the slightly creepy ones that crop up on your feed with the exact thing you were browsing for the other day.

A paid subscription tier would be a huge departure from Meta’s hyper-efficient core business — a $110bn+ advertising monolith that's leaps ahead of its rivals in extracting value from users. Despite being a free service, Facebook alone rakes in nearly $18 every single month for each one of its US & Canadian users — substantially more than the $10-15 a month you might pay for services like Netflix, Spotify or Amazon Prime.

‍Adios and adieu, ads

‍If it is somewhat forced to experiment with a new business model, Europe is arguably the safest place for Meta to try one. At just over 400 million monthly active users, the region is substantially smaller than Facebook’s Asia-Pacific and Rest of the World user bases, of 1.35 billion and 1 billion, respectively. Furthermore, European users are far less lucrative than their American counterparts, contributing on average less than a third of what a typical American user adds to Facebook's revenue.

Convincing those European users to part ways with ~$6 a month to look at memes, vacation pictures and news headlines might be a tough ask though, even for the masters of monetization at Meta.

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5