Ahead of its earnings, expected after the bell today, Meta has announced plans to trial a paid tier on its apps.
The list of periodic charges granting entry to much of the essential watching, listening, and even tasting that modern life demands might now be getting one subscription service longer.
On Monday, Meta told TechCrunch that it plans to trial new premium subscriptions on social media apps Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp in the coming months. According to the company, the paid offerings will give users access to exclusive features such as expanded AI capabilities, though the “core experiences” will (supposedly) remain the same for users in the ad-supported tier.
Still, unlike Spotify and Netflix, which actually pay for the content on their platforms and are only incrementally looking to advertising to juice up their bottom lines, Meta is already squeezing plenty of revenue from users without a paid subscriber model. In its third-quarter results back in October, the company reported total revenues of $51.2 billion — about $50 billion (~98%) of which came directly from advertising.
Meta’s ability to turn eyeballs into cash has seen it rake in a cumulative $813 billion from ads since 2019. And, having put ads in WhatsApp for the first time last June, this figure is only expected to get larger when the tech behemoth reports its quarterly earnings later today. Indeed, Meta’s only division in which consumers pay up rather than advertisers — Reality Labs — is also the only one that continues to light billions of dollars on fire.
The new tiered model comes as Meta looks to expand its AI offering, with the tech giant outlining plans to scale Manus — the web-browsing, content-producing AI agent it acquired right at the end of 2025 — and short-form video generator Vibes as part of the subscription plans.
But what might convince some more social media-savvy users to start paying up are additional features designed to give “more control” over Instagram accounts in particular, including creating unlimited audience lists, seeing which followers don’t follow them back, and viewing a Story without the poster seeing that they viewed it.
Tesla is not bringing S3XY back.
Microsoft released its second-quarter earnings on Wednesday.
Even with spending much higher than expected, Meta still expects operating income to increase year on year in 2026.
All eyes will be on Microsoft’s Azure cloud revenue growth, and just how much it’s increasing its capital expenditure.
Amazon announced Wednesday that it’s cutting 16,000 roles across the company, having laid off 14,000 workers only three months ago.
“As I shared in October, we’ve been working to strengthen our organization by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy,” Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology Beth Galetti wrote in the press release. “While many teams finalized their organizational changes in October, other teams did not complete that work until now.”
CEO Andy Jassy previously said that the October layoffs were “about culture” rather than AI-related cost cutting. Galetti says layoffs, now totaling 30,000, won’t become a regular occurrence.
“Some of you might ask if this is the beginning of a new rhythm — where we announce broad reductions every few months. That’s not our plan.”
CEO Andy Jassy previously said that the October layoffs were “about culture” rather than AI-related cost cutting. Galetti says layoffs, now totaling 30,000, won’t become a regular occurrence.
“Some of you might ask if this is the beginning of a new rhythm — where we announce broad reductions every few months. That’s not our plan.”
