Techniques are described herein for determining whether to provide an advertisement to a user of a social network. The determination is based on a click probability and a social network value for the user. The click probability indicates a likelihood of the user to select the advertisement if provided to the user via the social network. The social network value is based on a subscription probability of the user and further based on subscription probabilities of other users in the social network that are included in an affinity set of the user. Each subscription probability indicates a likelihood of a respective user to subscribe to a paid service with respect to the social network.