Zoom adding advertisements to the free tier of its service

https://blog.zoom.us/zoom-continued-access-for-basic-users-with-advertising-program/

by JumpCrisscross • 5 years ago

342 219 5 years ago

blog.zoom.us

personjerry• 5 years ago

After the video call seems fine to me.

paranoidrobot• 5 years ago

"Okay, thanks, bye"

killall -9 zoom

justinc8687• 5 years ago

Given, that unlike many advertising supported services, you can pay Zoom and remove ads, I fail to see a problem with this.

crate_barre2• 5 years ago

It’s the same as seeing ads on a chat platform. Why bother? There are plenty of alternatives with no ads. Developers won’t fall for this, but I guess your local church group won’t know any better.

ryanianian2• 5 years ago

Are there actually viable alternatives with similar quality and latency factors to Zoom?

Last I checked, the competitors, whether free or not, all had meaningful downsides (quality, latency, self-hosted, inextricably bundled to another system, etc) with the only upside being “it’s not Zoom.”

Honest question. I’m sure the land has changed a lot in the last 6-12 months.

mschuster912• 5 years ago

Given, that unlike many advertising supported services, you can pay Zoom and remove ads

If you are an enterprise, yes. For individual usage - like, for example, hosting a virtual beer night with friends - you have to go for a subscription that you have to take care to cancel afterwards.

akudha• 5 years ago

It would be nice to have some laws around subscription services. Something along the lines of

1. Services have to inform the user (text, email...) every time they charge their card. Even better would be to inform 48 hours before, so users have a chance to cancel.

2. Any subscription service should provide the user to choose the duration, when they sign up. If I need LinkedIn subscription for 3 months, then I should be able to choose at the time of subscription, and it should be canceled automatically after three monthly payments.

And so on. These are all trivial to implement tech wise.

But hey, who am I kidding. These are never going to happen

dannyw• 5 years ago

I have a feeling that this is probably more of an upgrade call to action, and they probably don't expect material revenue from ads.

Even at $5 CPM (high for a web banner), zoom will make... half a penny per meeting, before incurring multiple cents in bandwidth costs.

londons_explore• 5 years ago

The ad can be a silent video ad permanantly playing at the side of the screen. One ad every 30 seconds should become quite a lot of ad views by the end of a long meeting.

kortex• 5 years ago

Oh great, that's exactly what we need for meeting engagement and zoom fatigue: distracting sidebar ads.

Maybe it will encourage people to giddy up and finish just to get away from the ads.

koolba• 5 years ago

It’ll be more than $5 CPM for an ad where you know the consumer:

- Has their audio enabled and speakers on

- Has personalized data and history associated with their account

- Has a camera aimed at them to detect eyeball ad tracking

geocar• 5 years ago

Even at $5 CPM (high for a web banner), zoom will make... half a penny per meeting, before incurring multiple cents in bandwidth costs.

Zoom says they have over 3.3 trillion meeting-minutes as of October 2020: Let's assume they are counting each party to the meeting separately, and that "free tier" represents a mere 10% of their traffic: A $1 CPM rotated every five minutes is $660m every year.

Ad serving (technology) is cheap if done smartly: I could serve a billion video ads a month for around $150k/pcm in 2013.

I would expect not only material revenue, but material growth as well.

ZiiS• 5 years ago

Adverts for Google Meet?

jmacd• 5 years ago

I highly doubt that any free tier user will care. You have to wonder why they would make this a news item however, other than to court potential advertisers?

ceejayoz• 5 years ago

Boosting stock performance. It's been dropping for a year now, after a big COVID run-up.

laurent92• 5 years ago

Whereby is still add-free. For the moment.

I’m surprised there aren’t more very easy open-source alternatives than https://jitsi.org/jitsi-meet/ , given WebRTC is peer-to-peer and doesn’t consume bandwidth from the hosting service.

yorwba• 5 years ago

It stops being peer-to-peer as soon as there are more than two participants (i.e more than one destination for the stream). Jitsi uses their Videobridge https://jitsi.org/jitsi-videobridge/ as a central server to do the multiplexing.

LurkingPenguin• 5 years ago

If you're not a customer, you're the product.

rexreed• 5 years ago

This is the one and only answer ;) Of course the alternative to making free customers the product is to upsell free customers to a paid plan and factor in the conversion rate when using free as a marketing method. But if the free product is "good enough" then there are few upsells (which I believe is Zoom's problem), and then it's back to the user is the product not the customer.

jen20• 5 years ago

And it seems irresistible to many companies to make paying customers the product too.

npteljes3• 5 years ago

This is a tired cliché. Users are products either way.

pg5• 5 years ago

I can't blame them, considering how high bandwidth costs are for video.

AlexAltea• 5 years ago

I can't blame them either... but isn't high bandwidth usage a solvable problem?

Why can't they switch to P2P audio/video transmission instead of funneling everything through their servers?

sokoloff• 5 years ago

I suspect the support costs and adoption friction for bypassing all possible consumer NAT devices would be high. (No one wants to get the reputation as “oh, that video conf software fails to work a lot”.)

I suppose “try the P2P method and fallback automatically/invisibly to server-connected if that fails” could work pretty well though.

stevewodil• 5 years ago

Because P2P doesn't scale well when you have tens or hundreds of people transmitting video and consuming the video on different devices (mobile vs desktop) across different regions. You can't guarantee the experience is good when you don't control the distribution. Also P2P had potential to expose user IP's

Cort3z• 5 years ago

The key issue with P2P is that you have many more total connections in the system, so the service itself usually takes a hit. You get N^2 in stead of N streams. You can also easier optimize the video quality per peer with a centralized system, possibly saving even further amounts of streams, because (as an example) you don't have to send out a 120p + 240p + 480p + 720p and so on, you only need to send one 720p stream, however this could conceivably be solved by smart compression. With p2p you would have to send the same stream to all participants. It becomes impractical very fast, and the quality of the service goes down quickly.

bryans• 5 years ago

According to Zoom, they annually host approximately 3.5 trillion minutes of video at 1.2Mbps. That's about $100 million worth of bandwidth for a company that generates $4 billion in revenue. And a portion of those hosted minutes are actually peer-to-peer and not going through their servers.

queuebert• 5 years ago

Yeah sure, but have quarterly revenues gone up? /s

cblconfederate• 5 years ago

Anything that competes with the advertising oligopoly is good.

lvl100• 5 years ago

People still use Zoom? Didn’t they hype up some productivity suite at the height of the pandemic to attract more investment money? Is Zoom management another scam management? One trick pony?

protomyth• 5 years ago

Every government and school meeting I've had to attend over the last two years is on Zoom. We tried to go with someone else but peer pressure made us get a contract with Zoom for all classes.

Traubenfuchs2• 5 years ago

Zoom UI & UX remains atrocious, I don't understand why they got that much traction.

pmarcelll• 5 years ago

There is one thing we want to make very clear: as noted in our Privacy Statement, we will not use meeting, webinar, or messaging content (specifically, audio, video, files, and messages) for any marketing, promotions, or third-party advertising purposes.

Maybe the most important sentence in the whole announcement.

tantalor• 5 years ago

Meaning everything else is on the table:

- names of participants, and their ad profiles

- meeting title, time, length

Now you are getting ads for dogfood because your coworker has a new pet.

_jal• 5 years ago

Now you are getting ads for dogfood because your coworker has a new pet

Or ads targeting key messages right before your team meets with a new vendor.

soheil• 5 years ago

What if you and everyone replying here get a paid version or just use Google Meet?

I don’t understand why all the negativity comes out when a company decides to stop subsidizing all the engineering, bandwidth, storage, servers, .. costs that goes into a product.

BarryMilo• 5 years ago

For now.

ashtonkem• 5 years ago

Honestly, privacy policies from ad supported companies are worthless. The pressure to break them and share that info is so great that I suspect most just quietly give in to it.

mdoms2• 5 years ago

As we know from multiple experiences, what Zoom says about privacy and the reality of it are very much separate.

coder10012• 5 years ago

A deal with Admob or another ad provider will mean they make pure profit (no bandwidth cost) on all free users!

Imagine all those bored users in forced meetings! They would click on anything to kill the boredom! :p

awestroke• 5 years ago

When you put it like that, it's genius

BiteCode_dev2• 5 years ago

Better, when you click, it triggers a game to kill time. But the game engages you with the product.

Evil genius.

coder10012• 5 years ago

you are on to something!

MattGaiser2• 5 years ago

There have been meetings where I would happily click though a slide deck of ads.

bitwize• 5 years ago

Punch the monkey to win an iPhone!

EMM_386• 5 years ago

This is only on a web page shown after the meeting has ended, not part of the video software itself.

I don't see what the big deal is.

expicli• 5 years ago

It matters because kids use this software. Who knows what will pop up

BiteCode_dev2• 5 years ago

Protecting the kid against immoral or chocking things is a, IMO, not as important as not exposing them to constant brain washing from ads.

If I have to chose between naked people and a coke ad, I'd rather have the kids see sex. Honestly, the former never had a negative impact on me, but the later really had.

btbuildem• 5 years ago

For now.

zippergz• 5 years ago

Exactly. Once they get that first hit of sweet, sweet ad revenue, there will inevitably be pressure to grow it, and then grow it faster. Zoom does not strike me as the kind of company that will be able to resist the temptation to insert ever more obnoxious ads, as long as it leads to revenue growth. (That said, they don't have to support a free tier at all, and it's not free to run, so I don't completely begrudge them looking for ways to monetize it beyond just Pro upgrades).

pornel• 5 years ago

Unless it's an open-source/self-hosted application, you're always at mercy of code owners.

kevinventullo• 5 years ago

I’m imagining a future update that increases their ad revenue by 10% due to a bug that randomly ends calls prematurely, thus creating more ad views.

Later on, a precocious junior engineer discovers the bug, but isn’t allowed to fix it due to the revenue hit.

hawski3• 5 years ago

I imagine it will become a good malware vector.

davidatbu3• 5 years ago

I don't understand how.

It is an ad on a page in the browser. Don't many other companies (Google, Facebook, etc) manage to do that without becoming vectors for malware?

seaman19213• 5 years ago

FOR NOW

jcun4128• 5 years ago

Imagine about to do a meeting, 30 second commercial comes on about some restaurant, well let's go get food.

Side note, at least now it's easy to make your own video setup, providers like Twilio/OpenTok, so... pay or set it up/pay yourself idk.

I get it though, it's like YouTube vs. Vimeo... costs money to facilitate that magic that just works/have the audience.

godshatter• 5 years ago

One that already shows up in a browser a few minutes into the meeting, even though I used the native app to connect to it. I consider it an ad for the program I'm already using, which is just bonkers, so I close it reflexively. I'm using the paid version, but if I weren't I would still close it as soon as I see it, so the ad would be wasted on me.

nightowl_games• 5 years ago

I dont see how you could not see that Ads are consuming every facet of our lives.

mattl3• 5 years ago

What is Zoom Video?

omershapira2• 5 years ago

I feel like for every business there exists threshold where PMs get convinced that selling ads isn't just a free-tier business model, but rather that any other revenue generation method sits within the Pareto frontier that an ads tier defines.

I once heard an ads account PM put it this way: "If you have enough money to buy a no-ads tier, someone will pay more to put an ad there"

mikepurvis2• 5 years ago

This definitely happened for cable TV and satellite radio— both started life as a paid, ad-free alternative, but the promise of a premium market that moneyed individuals had paid to escape to was just too enticing.

To a lesser extent you see it with magazines too, especially in the fashion space, where brands don't want to be in a "free" magazine, so the magazine has to charge a cover price, but they practically give away subscriptions since the cover price is not where they're making money.

btown2• 5 years ago

And even for streaming services, the rationale is "we can still call it ad-free, if the only preroll ads we run are for our own shows!" - which doesn't make them any less an advertisement!

If anything, it's the most measurable of (non-interactive) video ads, since the viewer's future engagement with the advertised show (correcting for the baseline expected viewership among subscribers not shown that ad) can be attributed to the advertisement itself.

And if retention can then be attributed to engagement, there's a monetary value for that ad space, which goes back to the grandparent post's sentiment: "someone will pay more to put an ad there."

vel0city2• 5 years ago

This definitely happened for cable TV

I keep seeing this, but in the US this isn't really true. Cable TV was originally sold as a way to get all the surrounding broadcast TV stations in to your home with near perfect signal quality without needing an antenna. This meant you would get all the ads those broadcast networks aired. Sure, cable networks did not inject additional ads, but there were still ads. It took a while before premium cable-only channels arrived, some of which touted being ad-free. But even then many of those premium channels had advertising from the beginning.

Ads were on cable TV since the get go.

AniseAbyss• 5 years ago

And it didn't happen with Netflix.

There's a market for subscriptions. Unfortunately you have to provide a really fucking great product. And most of these companies don't.

dangoor2• 5 years ago

There are some for whom the paid tier is "get rid of ads". YouTube, Spotify.

njovin3• 5 years ago

Even the Spotify paid tier has ads in podcasts. There's no escape.

dboreham2• 5 years ago

Hulu has ads in the "no ads" service too.

patates3• 5 years ago

In YT videos will still have "sponsored content" regardless. If they can't make YT display their ads, they will buy off the content creators. Ad industry is just so infectious.

tincholio• 5 years ago

I suspect that Spotify's ad strategy is to make them as obnoxious as possible, just to get you to buy the subscription. For me, the ads they played made it seem like their data science were either completely inept, or extremely evil.

Nextgrid3• 5 years ago

This is exactly why regulation is needed - not to ban ads, but to curtail the noxious effects of them (privacy invasion, lack of liability for malicious ads) to tip the balance back the other way.

UnFleshedOne• 5 years ago

And if they accidentally trip and ban ads, all the better.

jonnycomputer2• 5 years ago

+ product placement in shows and films,

+ selling information gleaned from consumption habits (e.g. song choice on Spotify, etc.)

Don't necessarily have to target on the platform itself.

einpoklum• 5 years ago

Readers should be reminded that Zoom also censors some Zoom meetings, preventing them from being held. This may not be very wide-spread, but it does happen:

* Panel discussion with Palestinian activist Leyla Khaled: https://theintercept.com/2020/11/14/zoom-censorship-leila-kh...

* Chinese opposition activists censored at the behest of China: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23498664

travisgriggs• 5 years ago

The internet was supposed to be better than what TV in the 80s became.

It’s more interactive now, but it’s starting to feel like a rerun lately.

mattl3• 5 years ago

Said who?

speedgoose• 5 years ago

travisgriggs, his username is placed above his message.

lotsofpulp• 5 years ago

It is better. People are free to write software, pay for bandwidth and computing costs, and content creation, and then distribute it for free.

People no longer have to depend on coaxial cable owners or satellite owners or TV airwaves owners to distribute their content.

gcatalfamo• 5 years ago

Will the free tier still be limited to 40 minutes with ads?

papito• 5 years ago

"Are you sick of your boss? CLICK HERE"

pram• 5 years ago

Have ads (preferably animated) as the virtual background of all the meeting participants. If their camera isn't on, then have a Memoji fill-in sitting in a virtual ad-world. True innovation!

qwertyuiop_• 5 years ago

That didn't take long.

ArtTimeInvestor• 5 years ago

How much work would it be to write an open source alternative to Zoom?

And another question:

Since most users nowadays sit behind a router that only allows outbound connections - how do Zoom users connect to each other?

dijit• 5 years ago

Right now? Nothing, jitsi meet exists.

https://meet.jit.si

https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet

aceazzameen• 5 years ago

I've been trying to get so many of my friends/family to use Jitsi instead of Zoom throughout the pandemic. Usually the response is, "Oh this is great!" And then they're back to using Zoom the next day because they're used to hearing "zoom" as a verb. Zoom did an incredible job marketing itself into a trend.

dboreham2• 5 years ago

WebRTC with NAT traversal is a mature technology now. The problems are a) making the client ultra-reliable and just work for regular users (Zoom's main USP imho), and b) someone needs to host the service for rendezvous/signaling, and to TUN the long tail of nodes for which NAT traversal doesn't work. There is no true P2P on today's NAT'ed Internet.

jhugo5• 5 years ago

and to TUN the long tail of nodes for which NAT traversal doesn't work. There is no true P2P on today's NAT'ed Internet.

The bigger problem, which affects all nodes even if they can establish direct connectivity, is just the bandwidth requirements of true P2P videoconferencing once you have more than a few participants in the meeting. People often find out that even a connection marketed as "1Gbit fibre" likely has unacceptable loss/delay/jitter once they try to transmit, say, 50Mbit/s of UDP at a high packet rate to a variety of international destinations at the same time.

evancoop• 5 years ago

While ads are frustrating, isn't the pervasive nature of surveillance capitalism worse? Would we rather pay some small amounts for the digital products we use, watch a handful of ads, or handover the totality of our thoughts, intentions, and behavior to the provider?

Seems like our grandparents were correct. Nothing is free.

zimbatm• 5 years ago

Did they finally realize that the 45min time limit on the free plan was a feature? :)

seaman19213• 5 years ago

Back to Google Meet then.

chovybizzass• 5 years ago

Google Meet fails at about 15 users. Zoom can handle hundreds.

jon-wood• 5 years ago

I'm curious, what are you doing that requires supporting hundreds of active participants (as opposed to a few active participants, plus a hundreds of spectators)?

seaman19213• 5 years ago

That is not true in my experience.. we regularly use meet with around 50 participants at work.

bborud2• 5 years ago

Use http://whereby.com instead. Reasonable people that make a markedly unfussy product.

(Full disclosure: I know the founders)

joosters• 5 years ago

Looks like HN comments have ads too...

bborud2• 5 years ago

Make something cool and I'll shill for you :)

blowski• 5 years ago

I've been using Whereby for the last couple of years, and I do like it. It works well for small calls, but for calls with more than 5 people I found that it started to use a lot of CPU. If you're smaller than that, it's actually one of the most frictionless videoconference tools around.

devoutsalsa• 5 years ago

I can't wait to see a 30 second video ad for an erectile dysfunction drug in the middle of a job interview.

CoastalCoder• 5 years ago

Seems more like an opportunity. "Hey, how did they know you're interviewing someone who can solve hard problems?"

dcchambers• 5 years ago

Probably a red flag if the company you're interviewing with is using the Zoom free tier ;)

cletus• 5 years ago

At sufficient scale anything free ceases to be so and anything cheap starts to get expensive. This certainly applies to bandwidth. I assume either the free tier was starting to get significantly expensive or it was simply so large that the potential ad revenue was too large a carrot to ignore. I can't say which.

But I feel like Zoom is missing an opportunity here. I just went through the exercise of googling "zoom pricing" and... I'm confused. I still don't know how much it costs.

Twitch can largely be credited with the model of supporting creators with monthly subscriptions. Obviously they didn't invent the monthly subscription but they made it "mainstream" (within the context of Twitch viewers) such that many creators can support themselves this way with audience sizes that aren't large enough to be supported by ad revenue.

The point is that Twitch created a user behaviour of supporting creators with sufficient scale to matter.

So with Zoom, the pricing should be transparent and obvious. Obviously you're going to have the company plans that cover all participants. It probably shouldn't be "unlimited" as those are your most valuable customers and the most willing to pay.

But the missed opportunity here is to incentivize individuals to pay with features that might matter to them. I'm not sure what those are but in the very least, paid users should receive no ads. Make this $5/month. Lots of people will pay that if you toss in a few premium features.

Ad-supporting free services is so pervasive because it's effective but it's also lazy. With the rise of remote work, there are a lot of people who will gladly pay some small monthly fee to make their life easier even if their employer won't. Build user behaviour.

the_other• 5 years ago

Knee jerk reaction here because I’m a layperson in this area…

anything cheap starts to get expensive. This certainly applies to bandwidth.

This breaks the basic supply-demand rule. It’s also happening more often. Why are our business models so messed uo?

MattGaiser2• 5 years ago

Each unit of bandwidth is probably getting cheaper, but if you end up giving away a ton of it, it is still a massive expense.

floatingatoll• 5 years ago

Modern advertising enable predatory pricing without significant (or any) financial cost to the predator. There are fewer (or no) protections against predatory pricing in most markets because classical economics assumed that businesses would fail if they deprived themselves of revenue. That is no longer the case.

nemothekid• 5 years ago

When it comes to bandwidth, supply is largely fixed and the suppliers (ISPs, AWS) are corrupt or would rather just collect rents. It's incredibly difficult for a new company to make inroads as well (even for a company like Google, which seems to have paused its Google Fiber rollout)

Nextgrid3• 5 years ago

They could always work on making the system peer-to-peer. You will never get 100% of the way there because of some overly restrictive networks, but you can get the majority of users (especially those on home connections without enterprise firewalls/etc) to connect directly making it sustainable enough (the last 10% can just be subsidized by paying users and/or by ads - it could literally be a "fix your network for P2P to work, or watch ads to pay for TURN relays).

wanderingshi• 5 years ago

do we not remember the disaster that was p2p skype

jhugo5• 5 years ago

P2P multiparty videoconferencing just isn't realistic outside of tech demos. In a call of 20 participants, someone with a typical 720p webcam would be transmitting more than 50Mbit/s, which doesn't sound like a lot when ISPs market so-called "1Gbit fibre", but in fact is more than a lot of residential connections and home Wi-Fi can reliably push without unacceptable loss/delay/jitter.

A product built with this architecture could not deliver the reliability and performance that Zoom delivers with the variety of connectivity quality that its users have.

comeonseriously• 5 years ago

... or it was simply so large that the potential ad revenue was too large a carrot to ignore.

I'm always inclined to think this is the case. Investors are always wanting to know how you're going to increase returns THIS quarter.

leodriesch• 5 years ago

Not sure if you would get many personal users to pay when there is Meet, Teams, Discord and FaceTime. IIRC they all don’t have ads.

cphoover• 5 years ago

I don't care as long as they don't track me. (They probably will)

thih9• 5 years ago

When I read the title, I thought about ads being shown during calls. Looks like this is about ads on the final browser screen only:

For this initial program, ads will be rolled out only on the browser page users see once they end their meeting. Only free Basic users in certain countries will see these ads if they join meetings that are hosted by other free Basic users.

bellyfullofbac• 5 years ago

"We heard you were talking about deliveries on your Zoom call. Try USP for fast deliveries, 10% off if you click here nowwwww!".

OneTimePetes• 5 years ago

For additional dystopian vibes, add the advertisement in the others voice- while synthesizing neural net face video..

Your coworkers and customers and boss are loving it..

jeffwask• 5 years ago

Are they also removing the 40 minute free tier time limit?

diebeforei485• 5 years ago

There are better ad-free tools like FaceTime (which can be used on the web) for speaking with friends and family.

ElijahLynn• 5 years ago

Peer to Peer WebRTC with https://meet.jit.si/ should get a bit busier now!

manquer• 5 years ago

Jitsi or any other p2p system is limited when more than 2 people are connected in the same room.

jhugo5• 5 years ago

Jitsi Meet (in common with other WebRTC videoconferencing systems in common use) is only P2P when there are exactly 2 people in the meeting. (And even then it may need to use a server depending on the type of connectivity you have.)

P2P videoconferencing beyond a few participants isn't very practical in the real world, due to the bandwidth requirements rapidly exceeding what a typical user's connection can reliably transmit without unacceptable loss/delay/jitter.

mdoms2• 5 years ago

I don't get why so many people use Zoom. I think it's an American thing? No one around here uses it. Even if we ignore the very serious China problem (which, we shouldn't) and the numerous security and privacy lapses (again, we shouldn't) it's simply a vastly inferior product to alternatives from Google. Apple, Microsoft and even some smaller orgs. The desktop UI is horrendous, confusing and stagnant. The video quality is ok, but the audio quality doesn't hold a candle to Google's Meet product.

jvanveen• 5 years ago

In case anyone is looking for an alternative to hosted services like Zoom/Teams: https://github.com/garage44/pyrite is an open-source Vue frontend for The Galène videoconference server(Pion/Golang).

munk-a• 5 years ago

And overnight Skype became relevant again.

shiohime• 5 years ago

Company creates a super successful product that is very user friendly Said product skyrockets and makes the company more money than they ever should have reasonably expected SV mindset of perpetual growth kicks in and corporate greed figures out ways to extract money even though they already fucking made it Product quality degrades over time

It's like clockwork. Yeah I'm sure that it costs a ton of money to maintain their product to scale. But you've gotta be kidding me that they didn't already make the money they should have needed to support this growth if you look at their net worth vs pre-pandemic and post-pandemic.

m0zg• 5 years ago

Zoom is just dumb. A year and a half of _everyone in the world_ using it and they couldn't even improve UX or introduce "raised hand" gesture or spatial audio so people wouldn't have to talk over one another, or even improve audio/video quality.

OTOH I feel like Slack used the opportunity well. Huddle is a very "astute" product decision.

Google Hangouts (or whatever it's called after their rebranding every 6 months) has improved leaps and bounds.

MS videoconferencing is the same as zoom - barely usable garbage.

Where's all the "innovation" all these companies constantly talk about? I want products that people use because they like them, not because they have to.

Mikho• 5 years ago

Looks like an attempt to extort users with aggressive ads to pay for subscription. Don't want any ads? Pay. The way YouTube does to enforce paid subscription on people by bombarding them with huge number of terrible ads.

Surprised people still use it considering that back office and R&D are in China and there was so many news about blocking users and groups outside China but ordered from China by CCP due to the discussed topics.

BTW, will Zoom now officially be collecting user data to sell more ads? I mean it kinda already did collect a lot of data to send it to China but officially this never happened. Now with ad business it will be official practice to aggressively collect data.

Zoom adding advertisements to the free tier of its service

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