At the moment, most social media platforms rely on mass audiences willingly signing up and sharing their data. This data is then used by the platforms to allow advertisers to target people with specific interests and characters. Facebook’s ability to do this with expertise is one of the success stories of the modern era. It has been so successful, along with platforms like Google, that the Australian competition regulator is assessing the impact of the huge shift in advertising spend towards these highly-targeted platforms and away from magazines, newspapers and other traditional media. Maybe it's time we all started paying for social media. But it’s a business model that paved the way for the “trust breach” – as Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg describes it – of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Despite this, speaking about the Facebook business model at a press conference on Thursday, Zuckerberg said it needed to do a “better job” of explaining its business model. He never mentioned changing it. It doesn’t use tracking, and the “vast majority” of data Facebook knows about its users is because they chose to share it, he says. And he said they don't sell data to advertisers – instead, the company allows targeting based on data it holds. In summary “people share information, we use that to help people connect and to make the services better, and we run ads to make it a free service that everyone in world can afford”. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video

This means most of the money these platforms make comes from advertisers. But it doesn’t mean the users of the platform aren’t paying for using it. It is a problem of “rhetoric” – how companies communicate and present to the public compared with what they’re really doing. Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims says this is an issue for many businesses, but very clearly with the digital giants. “I think with Facebook, Google, the other platform companies, they do a better job than other companies at trying to convince you they’re not in business to make money,” he says.

There’s plenty of idealism on the internet about why everything should be free and he says these types of platforms feed into this rhetoric. However, as he says, “It’s not free, you’re paying with your data”. And data is increasingly valuable - in aggregate. To Facebook, based on its latest available data on average revenue per user for Asia Pacific, you’re worth $2.54. If you’re in America or Canada, this climbs to $26.76, and $8.86 in Europe.

These are not huge figures and without the sort of scale it currently has, Facebook’s business model simply doesn’t work. And to get scale, many would argue, it requires the platform to be free. The question then is how much are you willing to pay to protect your privacy? Would you pay at all? Some users would likely be willing to pay more than Facebook’s revenue figure to ensure their data is safe and to avoid being manipulated by advertisers or political groups. This subscription model has the potential to take hold as a result of the backlash against the Facebook data scandal, says Australian National University associate professor Rob Ackland.

“We’ve all been in a pot of water and it has been heating up slowly ... and people may now try to jump out of the pot because of the revelations about the extent of [the data use],” he says. He thinks the future of being social online will involve a “centralised” company that allows you to jump between platforms. “Facebook is a walled garden, so is Twitter and LinkedIn. You have to create a profile and put information in to make it work for you but if you want to leave them you have to accept deleting your data,” he says. Loading One of the reasons people are unhappy to leave Facebook is because they have their photos there, and their friends and family are already using it.

“This could prompt the emergence of distributed social networks where you can move your profile around or move your profile around in a way that doesn’t result in the death of your data. The technology is there,” Dr Ackland says. The last few years have seen a resurgence in subscription-based platforms, from Netflix to Spotify, and even traditional media like The New York Times has recorded an uptick in subscribers. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely Facebook will be taking any sort of a paid approach.

Its public position, stated on its website, is that it is free and “will never require that you pay to continue using the site”. When encrypted messaging platform WhatsApp was launched, it was initially based on a subscription model. In some cases it charged $US0.99 a year. And when Facebook bought it, it made it free. This is, after all, its business model and more people use the app now than they did before. If you want cheap services you have to allow advertising. It’s not like people complain when they see advertising on TV. Wray Buntine, Monash University professor

But maybe now is the tipping point where people realise their data has value and won’t be willing to give it up so easily. But Monash University professor Wray Buntine is less emphatic about the need for social media platforms to change their business model. “If you want cheap services you have to allow advertising. It’s not like people complain when they see advertising on TV,” he says. When he worked at a major technology company, a team put up a proposal for a specialised high-personalised search function. This may have come at a subscription cost. “They weren’t interested at the time because if they can’t sell it to 100 million people it wouldn’t be of interest to them.”