[thastings]

As others have already stated, without either actual paying users (not the celebrities) or some form of advertising costs can become very high quite fast.

Even though you are against all forms of advertising, some really privacy oriented form of it may be acceptable by your intended users. Some thoughts:

- Users need to disclose some topics/subtopics (either broad or even very niche interests)

- The ads need to be conformant to some predefined, non-intrusive style guide: maybe black-and-white or a limited color palette and font selection. This could lead to interesting and even creative ads on the platform

- Advertisers could get anonymized click-counts for their specific categories, and maybe some other category-based info, but user data would be immediately aggregated and not used for specific targeting

- Base users would see 1/3 ads in their feeds, but some payments could reduce this to 1/5, 1/8, all the way to zero.

This approach might provide the intended privacy benefits with much less noise, but also not alienate the average user that expects social to be free of any cost.