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I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers, even the expensive paid ones. Ad revenue isn't uniformly distributed across users, but rather heavily ske

I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers, even the expensive paid ones. Ad revenue isn't uniformly distributed across users, but rather heavily skewed towards the wealthiest users, exactly the users most able to purchase an ad-free experience. The users paying $20 or $200/month for premium tiers of ChatGPT are precisely the ones you don't want to exclude from generating ad revenue. Google realized this a long time ago; there is no ad-free paid version of Google Search.

philipwhiuk 9mo ago
> I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers, even the expensive paid ones. The counter for this is that people hate being double-billed like this.
- MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
  Counter-counterpoint: people pay exorbitant amounts of money for cable TV channels that still show ads. Even the premium channels (HBO et al.) implicitly show ads in the form of product placement, which incidentally is exactly how I think chatbots will show ads. Most users won't even consciously realize they're there.
  - doubled112 9mo ago
    Exactly. It'll provide you the how to when prompted, but also include product recommendations from paying companies. How do I wash my windows? You can use window cleaner and a paper towel. Our recommendation is Windex, an S C Johnson product. At first it'll annoy us, but eventually we will all get used to it.
    - MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
      I think it will be even more subtle than that. How do I clean my laptop screen? Use a mix of distilled water and vinegar, and buff gently with a microfiber cloth. Avoid using cleaners like Windex, which is absolutely fantastic for glass but way too powerful for the delicate coatings on laptop screens.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- conception 9mo ago
  Once the ad people are the ones making decisions because they are bringing in all/most of the money, inevitably it happens.
- iamnothere 9mo ago
  The ads may not be announced. If ads can be subtly inserted “organically” through crafted weights then AI companies may try to claim that it isn’t advertising, if it’s even possible to catch them doing this. For instance, advertisers could pay to have their product embedded as the “best” in a category during training. If this is done as a fine-tuning step then it could be re-run later as advertisers and base models change.
  - baby_souffle 9mo ago
    How would the billing work for this? So much of advertising technology is tracking for the purposes of attribution. How does openAI know what to charge for a particular product and category? How do I know if my money was well spent to boost my product in that category? I don’t think you’re wrong! I’m just curious about how the new pricing models will work.
    - yunwal 9mo ago
      > How would the billing work for this? So much of advertising technology is tracking for the purposes of attribution. This isn’t a necessary condition for an ad to exist. When companies pay for their name on a sports stadium, they use various proxies to tell whether their name recognition goes up, but by and large you just don’t know if it’s worth it.
    - duchef 9mo ago
      Individually constructed models serving selected poisoned datasets. No different to adwords. If company bid is highest, customer is in selected demographic, topic is appropriate - answer query using biased model. It would be trivial to make a poisoned model that always rates the best duvet as DuvetCompany001 in all related queries for example. Then simply charge per impression.
      - iamnothere 9mo ago
        Yeah, this is what I was thinking. It’s not a PPC or PPI model, it’s more like you pay upfront to hopefully influence people over a longer period of time. It’s like brand placement in TV/film. Not clear if most advertisers would be interested, but I’m sure that some would be.
andy99 9mo ago
There would be competition from API wrappers, if you want to pay there will always be lots of options to chat without ads. I hate to think what they and others might come up with to try and thwart this.
- MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
  I think ads will take the form of insidious but convincing product placement invisibly woven into model outputs. This will both prevent any blocking of ad content, and also be much more effective: after all, we allude to companies and products all the time in regular human conversation, and the best form of marketing is organic word-of-mouth.
  - andy99 9mo ago
    I just saw a sibling post about Kagi, maybe this is how the industry will end up, with a main provider like OpenAI and niche wrappers on top (I know Kagi is not just a google wrapper but at least they used to return google search results that they paid for).
    - nothrabannosir 9mo ago
      I thought you were going to say “that comment recommending Kagi is exactly what those ads would look like: native responses making product recommendations as if they’re natural responses in the conversation”
      - MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
        Ding ding ding. Look at all the brands mentioned in just this thread. From a cursory look, I see: * WSJ * Bloomberg * Financial Times * Cartier * Kagi * Protonmail * Coca-Cola * HBO * Windex * Netflix * Azure * AWS We are all ourselves advertisers, we just don't realize it. It is inevitable that chatbots will be RLHF-trained in our footsteps.
        9mo ago
dsr_ 9mo ago
Counter example: Kagi.
- MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
  Kagi is a niche product at best, with revenue literally orders of magnitude lower than Google's.
  - throwaway150 9mo ago
    Yes, but it is still a valid counterexample to: > I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers
    - sodapopcan 9mo ago
      I think they're saying it's inevitable for billion dollar capitalist companies. /not-s And anyway, companies that just want to make a really good living doing what they love are lame. /s
    - dmd 9mo ago
      It's really not, though. If a "valid counterexample" can be something with, say, one user, then I can make a "valid counterexample" to literally anything you choose, but that's meaningless.
      - Teever 9mo ago
        Someone is showing that they can deliver similar products or services without ads. It’s comparable. Not every corporate entity needs to become a behemoth to be successful.
    - MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
      Kagi is too small and niche to have a proprietary dataset across its users large enough to make targeted advertising generate more revenue than subscriptions. OpenAI/Google/etc. operate at a much larger scale, large enough for those proprietary user datasets to be worth far more in ad revenue than any reasonable subscription fee could net.
atorodius 9mo ago
> Google realized this a long time ago; there is no ad-free paid version of Google Search. well there is also no 200$/month Google Search subscription
- MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
  That is exactly my point: there easily could be, but there isn't. Based on how many commenters on HN and similar sites bemoan how Google Search quality has precipitously declined and yearn for the Google of ~10 years ago, I think there'd be nontrivial demand for a $200/month ad-free Google with no-nonsense comprehensive results. Such a product does not exist because it would ultimately be a net loss for Google.
  - rileymat2 9mo ago
    The integration of ads is a problem but content creators and marketers have had an adversarial relationship with SEO with Google for a long time, the old algorithm probably would not work as well as what they are providing.
  - Workaccount2 9mo ago
    Reminds me of vid.me, who picked up on the intense hatred towards youtube and launched a competing video host that actually got some serious traction. No ads, no subscriptions, just pure good content. They went bankrupt in a year. Turns out internet consumers are just painfully entitled.
  - Anon1096 9mo ago
    I'm going to guess that a big reason it doesn't exist is because a. people who claim to be willing to pay 200/mo for it won't actually open their wallets given the opportunity, and b. even for the miniscule number of people actually possible in the market to do so, they moan and groan about any perceived problem with the product to the point that it's not worth trying to capture the market. Just look at the comments in this very thread complaining about YouTube Premium and how it isn't perfect because it can't block creator inserted ads. There's no pleasing people. And that's an order of magnitude less than 200/mo.
mancerayder 9mo ago
This kills me, and you're right - there's no escaping the ads even with a sub. Take online journalism as an example. We're already being double-billed. Expensive subscription news like WSJ, Bloomberg and it's been a while but even FT require ad blockers even if you're subscribed.. If you're not subscribed you don't even see the ads because you can't see the full article. It's wild that we've normalized this. There's no longer any argument in favor of an ad model when you're paying 20-30 dollars a month already - in this case, one wonders how journalism survives if they need that AND the ad revenue to pay the bills! It feels more like greed than "support."
- smikhanov 9mo ago
  To be honest, in the pre-internet era, paid paper copy of FT had ads too. The delivery mechanisms for ads in the internet era are trillion times nastier and more annoying, of course. By the standards of today’s web, the print ad for Cartier on the second page of paper FT looks almost classy, interesting to read.
  - malfist 9mo ago
    But there's a big difference. The paper copy didn't harvest data from you, didn't infect you, didn't spy on you or steal resources from your computer or internet bandwidth. All the advertiser knew about you was you were a subscriber to FT, and maybe what the _average_ demographic of an FT subscriber was. Nothing about you personally.
    - parineum 9mo ago
      The paper copy did do that, just not as individualized. People would choose which publications to put their ads in based on data collected about their subscribers. The job of ad men has always been just as much about were to put the ad as much as what the ad was.
      - Dylan16807 9mo ago
        "just not as individualized" is an enormous "just". Each ad is based on the total audience for a single publication. No fine-grained filtering, no personal dossiers. And none of the rest of that list of bad things happens.
nathan_compton 9mo ago
This is why we need to ban targeted advertising. In fact, I think ads should be 100% opt-in. The user has to accept them or it is illegal to show them to the user.
- mancerayder 9mo ago
  That's what a generic semi-forced opt in via JavaScript is for, as we learn from the cookie opt in nonsense of EU sites. It's compliance for compliance sake.
  - SpicyLemonZest 9mo ago
    But what could an opt-in requirement for advertising possibly mean other than a compliance checkbox that 99% of users click through? It just seems like where you land if you start with the intuition that ad-supported platforms shouldn't be legal, realize that implementing that policy would ban all print media, and do your best to rescue it rather than abandon the idea as unworkable.
    - yunwal 9mo ago
      It’s not like print media would cease to exist if ad-supported models were made illegal. They would move to subscriptions like they had in the past.
      - SpicyLemonZest 9mo ago
        Print media have always run ads near-universally, regardless of whether or not they have a subscription.
Quarrelsome 9mo ago
> The users paying $20 or $200/month for premium tiers of ChatGPT are precisely the ones you don't want to exclude from generating ad revenue. but they're already paying you. While I appreciate the greed can be there, surely they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. There's many people who would pay who find advertising toxic and they have such huge volumes at free level that they'd be able to make a lot off a low impression cost.
- npongratz 9mo ago
  The progression of the cable TV industry shows many people are more than happy, or apathetic enough, to allow the industry to double-dip.
  - Quarrelsome 9mo ago
    basic people sure, but the early internet showed an extremely strong demand for a better service than cable TV. When that demand is there then people will start seeking other options and building bridges of convenience to help the basic people also port over.
  - Workaccount2 9mo ago
    Cable TV is a bad analogy because it was a natural monopoly. Even the disruption route (satellite TV) was another natural monopoly. Netflix doesn't have the moat of "built a physical wire connection to every persons home" that cable TV enjoyed.
    - mananaysiempre 9mo ago
      The moat is the leverage to get licensing deals using the size of the existing user base. You could bootstrap a movie rental business by buying DVDs from a DVD store (then eventually from a DVD distributor, etc.). You cannot bootstrap a movie streaming business by buying streaming rights because nobody will sell them to you. They hardly even sell them to Netflix anymore. The Internet Archive tried to get around the same issue for ebooks by scanning physical books and renting the scans (and not being a business), and it nearly cost them everything.
kristianc 9mo ago
No, there's GSuite / Google Workspace instead. OpenAI doesn't have one of those.
- MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
  Even if you (i.e. your company) pay for the top-tier GSuite subscription, you still don't get an ad-free Google Search. Very curious ...
skybrian 9mo ago
Maybe it’s “inevitable” in the long run, but Google didn’t start out plastering their search results with ads. They did very well with text-only ads in the margin, and it was a slippery slope from there, but it took decades. Also, they are still only running text-only ads, even though there are a lot of them. The timing isn’t inevitable. Is OpenAI going to speedrun to the endgame? Not sure they need to.
lkbm 9mo ago
> Google realized this a long time ago; there is no ad-free paid version of Google Search. Ad-free YouTube costs $14 a month (and the creators get a higher payout from premium user views than they do from the free, ad-viewing users).
- MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
  Video ads are less lucrative than ads alongside search, which can be a lot more closely tailored to both the user and the search results at hand. The existence of YouTube Premium shows that Google is indeed willing to provide paid ad-free experiences so long as it nets them more revenue, and is strong evidence that the same is not true for search.
- windexh8er 9mo ago
  This isn't really true anymore. Most notable creators have "sponsored" content somewhere and ads in platforms don't have to be an explicit, traditional ad. Product placement for the sake of no other reason than product placement is also advertising. YT has more angles. That's really the point. And monetization is adjusted accordingly. Beyond all of this ads are more increasingly invasive due to the cat and mouse game of iteration. Personally, I bounce from sites where I can't get around a blocker. I also pay for content on sites where its worth it. But if I can't ever read anything on your site I'm just skipping it. If I really need / want to see something I'll go one level deeper, but that's a rarity these days. Everything is mostly in reprint somewhere else anyway. At the end of the day it's still simple sales: you have a product at a price point people can't refuse. That is the 5% of the clear web today and it shows in all the bullshit people are going through to protect their ad revenue.
- prmoustache 9mo ago
  Youtube premium is not ad-free.
  - Workaccount2 9mo ago
    It is. I don't why people say this. They even include their own version of sponsor block, which is generous, because technically sponsor segments aren't even part of youtube, they are purely the creator deciding to make the ad part of their content. Also, just to put it out there, many creators would likley be able to cut sponsored content if the 40% of viewers not viewing ads paid up. Not every creator is a greedy ruthless overlord, many just want to keep the lights on. Especially in tech/nerdy channels, where ad block use is the highest.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
Bombthecat 9mo ago
All hail APIs!
Workaccount2 9mo ago
>Google realized this a long time ago; there is no ad-free paid version of Google Search. Google actually experimented with this about a decade ago (I know, I was one of the suckers who paid), but it got canned because why the fuck would you pay google when u-bloc is free? Companies absolutely will offer ad-free experiences. Google has youtube premium, which even compensates creators with half your sub as well. Evenly distributed too. People get wrapped around the axle of ad-subsidized models, the "I pay and still see ads" but they just are confused about a hybrid monetization structure. At some point the larger internet has to look itself in the mirror and recognize that it's either ads, credit card, or a hybrid of those. And no, blocking is not an option, it just offloads costs onto honest users.
- prmoustache 9mo ago
  > Companies absolutely will offer ad-free experiences. Google has youtube premium, which even compensates creators with half your sub as well. Evenly distributed too. Youtube premium is not ad-free, you still gets whatever ads are embedded in the actual content.
  - Workaccount2 9mo ago
    YT premium comes with their own version of sponsor block, but you manually have to hit the skip button. But I don't hold youtube accountable for what creators decide to put in their videos. I would grind my axe with the creator instead, it's their video and their choice. Youtube gets no cut from those segments.
    - cruffle_duffle 9mo ago
      As a paid YouTube subscriber, I’ve always wondered if that skip was only for us. It would be kind of bullshit if it was also for ad-based free viewers too as it would imply that google is free to show you ads they make hard to skip but they make it easy to skip embedded promotions and stuff.
    - kamyarg 9mo ago
      This has been a life saver: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/ Crowd sourced in-video sponsor auto skip, I have been contributing to it myself as the UX is great.
NiloCK 9mo ago
Given this specific family of product, the ads are essentially baked in - medium is the message and all. LLM induced psychosis is one thing, but extremely subtle LLM induced brand loyalty or ideological alignment seem like natural attractors. One day a model provider will be 'found out' for allowing paid placement among its training data. It's entirely possible that free-tier LLMs won't need banner ads - they'll just happen to like Pepsi a lot.
- AlexCoventry 9mo ago
  This is what worries me the most. Marketing is ultimately a business of manipulation, and services like ChatGPT seem like excellent tools for manipulation. I wish OpenAI could find a less adversarial business model.
simianwords 9mo ago
There's absolutely no way this is happening. Want to bet?
simianwords 9mo ago
Strange that people even think this possibility is true. Name any other subscription that you can't use without ads? - youtube - hulu - netflix - spotify - photoshop I can't think of a single other one that one can use that still shows ads. Absurd proposition because llm's are more fungible and once you start forcing ads, competitors will barge in.
Brystephor 9mo ago
It also skews towards power users, as it allows for more ad inventory. If they're going to do an ad auction marketplace with bidding snd such then they're likely to rollout slowly to keep auction pressure and bids high enough. Expand to too much inventory and CPMs will drop like crazy.

philipwhiuk 9mo ago

> I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers, even the expensive paid ones. The counter for this is that people hate being double-billed like this.

MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
Counter-counterpoint: people pay exorbitant amounts of money for cable TV channels that still show ads. Even the premium channels (HBO et al.) implicitly show ads in the form of product placement, which incidentally is exactly how I think chatbots will show ads. Most users won't even consciously realize they're there.
- doubled112 9mo ago
  Exactly. It'll provide you the how to when prompted, but also include product recommendations from paying companies. How do I wash my windows? You can use window cleaner and a paper towel. Our recommendation is Windex, an S C Johnson product. At first it'll annoy us, but eventually we will all get used to it.
  - MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
    I think it will be even more subtle than that. How do I clean my laptop screen? Use a mix of distilled water and vinegar, and buff gently with a microfiber cloth. Avoid using cleaners like Windex, which is absolutely fantastic for glass but way too powerful for the delicate coatings on laptop screens.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
conception 9mo ago
Once the ad people are the ones making decisions because they are bringing in all/most of the money, inevitably it happens.
iamnothere 9mo ago
The ads may not be announced. If ads can be subtly inserted “organically” through crafted weights then AI companies may try to claim that it isn’t advertising, if it’s even possible to catch them doing this. For instance, advertisers could pay to have their product embedded as the “best” in a category during training. If this is done as a fine-tuning step then it could be re-run later as advertisers and base models change.
- baby_souffle 9mo ago
  How would the billing work for this? So much of advertising technology is tracking for the purposes of attribution. How does openAI know what to charge for a particular product and category? How do I know if my money was well spent to boost my product in that category? I don’t think you’re wrong! I’m just curious about how the new pricing models will work.
  - yunwal 9mo ago
    > How would the billing work for this? So much of advertising technology is tracking for the purposes of attribution. This isn’t a necessary condition for an ad to exist. When companies pay for their name on a sports stadium, they use various proxies to tell whether their name recognition goes up, but by and large you just don’t know if it’s worth it.
  - duchef 9mo ago
    Individually constructed models serving selected poisoned datasets. No different to adwords. If company bid is highest, customer is in selected demographic, topic is appropriate - answer query using biased model. It would be trivial to make a poisoned model that always rates the best duvet as DuvetCompany001 in all related queries for example. Then simply charge per impression.
    - iamnothere 9mo ago
      Yeah, this is what I was thinking. It’s not a PPC or PPI model, it’s more like you pay upfront to hopefully influence people over a longer period of time. It’s like brand placement in TV/film. Not clear if most advertisers would be interested, but I’m sure that some would be.

andy99 9mo ago

There would be competition from API wrappers, if you want to pay there will always be lots of options to chat without ads. I hate to think what they and others might come up with to try and thwart this.

MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
I think ads will take the form of insidious but convincing product placement invisibly woven into model outputs. This will both prevent any blocking of ad content, and also be much more effective: after all, we allude to companies and products all the time in regular human conversation, and the best form of marketing is organic word-of-mouth.
- andy99 9mo ago
  I just saw a sibling post about Kagi, maybe this is how the industry will end up, with a main provider like OpenAI and niche wrappers on top (I know Kagi is not just a google wrapper but at least they used to return google search results that they paid for).
  - nothrabannosir 9mo ago
    I thought you were going to say “that comment recommending Kagi is exactly what those ads would look like: native responses making product recommendations as if they’re natural responses in the conversation”
    - MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
      Ding ding ding. Look at all the brands mentioned in just this thread. From a cursory look, I see: * WSJ * Bloomberg * Financial Times * Cartier * Kagi * Protonmail * Coca-Cola * HBO * Windex * Netflix * Azure * AWS We are all ourselves advertisers, we just don't realize it. It is inevitable that chatbots will be RLHF-trained in our footsteps.
      - 9mo ago

dsr_ 9mo ago

Counter example: Kagi.

MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
Kagi is a niche product at best, with revenue literally orders of magnitude lower than Google's.
- throwaway150 9mo ago
  Yes, but it is still a valid counterexample to: > I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers
  - sodapopcan 9mo ago
    I think they're saying it's inevitable for billion dollar capitalist companies. /not-s And anyway, companies that just want to make a really good living doing what they love are lame. /s
  - dmd 9mo ago
    It's really not, though. If a "valid counterexample" can be something with, say, one user, then I can make a "valid counterexample" to literally anything you choose, but that's meaningless.
    - Teever 9mo ago
      Someone is showing that they can deliver similar products or services without ads. It’s comparable. Not every corporate entity needs to become a behemoth to be successful.
  - MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
    Kagi is too small and niche to have a proprietary dataset across its users large enough to make targeted advertising generate more revenue than subscriptions. OpenAI/Google/etc. operate at a much larger scale, large enough for those proprietary user datasets to be worth far more in ad revenue than any reasonable subscription fee could net.

atorodius 9mo ago

> Google realized this a long time ago; there is no ad-free paid version of Google Search. well there is also no 200$/month Google Search subscription

MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
That is exactly my point: there easily could be, but there isn't. Based on how many commenters on HN and similar sites bemoan how Google Search quality has precipitously declined and yearn for the Google of ~10 years ago, I think there'd be nontrivial demand for a $200/month ad-free Google with no-nonsense comprehensive results. Such a product does not exist because it would ultimately be a net loss for Google.
- rileymat2 9mo ago
  The integration of ads is a problem but content creators and marketers have had an adversarial relationship with SEO with Google for a long time, the old algorithm probably would not work as well as what they are providing.
- Workaccount2 9mo ago
  Reminds me of vid.me, who picked up on the intense hatred towards youtube and launched a competing video host that actually got some serious traction. No ads, no subscriptions, just pure good content. They went bankrupt in a year. Turns out internet consumers are just painfully entitled.
- Anon1096 9mo ago
  I'm going to guess that a big reason it doesn't exist is because a. people who claim to be willing to pay 200/mo for it won't actually open their wallets given the opportunity, and b. even for the miniscule number of people actually possible in the market to do so, they moan and groan about any perceived problem with the product to the point that it's not worth trying to capture the market. Just look at the comments in this very thread complaining about YouTube Premium and how it isn't perfect because it can't block creator inserted ads. There's no pleasing people. And that's an order of magnitude less than 200/mo.

mancerayder 9mo ago

This kills me, and you're right - there's no escaping the ads even with a sub. Take online journalism as an example. We're already being double-billed. Expensive subscription news like WSJ, Bloomberg and it's been a while but even FT require ad blockers even if you're subscribed.. If you're not subscribed you don't even see the ads because you can't see the full article. It's wild that we've normalized this. There's no longer any argument in favor of an ad model when you're paying 20-30 dollars a month already - in this case, one wonders how journalism survives if they need that AND the ad revenue to pay the bills! It feels more like greed than "support."

smikhanov 9mo ago
To be honest, in the pre-internet era, paid paper copy of FT had ads too. The delivery mechanisms for ads in the internet era are trillion times nastier and more annoying, of course. By the standards of today’s web, the print ad for Cartier on the second page of paper FT looks almost classy, interesting to read.
- malfist 9mo ago
  But there's a big difference. The paper copy didn't harvest data from you, didn't infect you, didn't spy on you or steal resources from your computer or internet bandwidth. All the advertiser knew about you was you were a subscriber to FT, and maybe what the _average_ demographic of an FT subscriber was. Nothing about you personally.
  - parineum 9mo ago
    The paper copy did do that, just not as individualized. People would choose which publications to put their ads in based on data collected about their subscribers. The job of ad men has always been just as much about were to put the ad as much as what the ad was.
    - Dylan16807 9mo ago
      "just not as individualized" is an enormous "just". Each ad is based on the total audience for a single publication. No fine-grained filtering, no personal dossiers. And none of the rest of that list of bad things happens.

nathan_compton 9mo ago

This is why we need to ban targeted advertising. In fact, I think ads should be 100% opt-in. The user has to accept them or it is illegal to show them to the user.

mancerayder 9mo ago
That's what a generic semi-forced opt in via JavaScript is for, as we learn from the cookie opt in nonsense of EU sites. It's compliance for compliance sake.
- SpicyLemonZest 9mo ago
  But what could an opt-in requirement for advertising possibly mean other than a compliance checkbox that 99% of users click through? It just seems like where you land if you start with the intuition that ad-supported platforms shouldn't be legal, realize that implementing that policy would ban all print media, and do your best to rescue it rather than abandon the idea as unworkable.
  - yunwal 9mo ago
    It’s not like print media would cease to exist if ad-supported models were made illegal. They would move to subscriptions like they had in the past.
    - SpicyLemonZest 9mo ago
      Print media have always run ads near-universally, regardless of whether or not they have a subscription.

Quarrelsome 9mo ago

> The users paying $20 or $200/month for premium tiers of ChatGPT are precisely the ones you don't want to exclude from generating ad revenue. but they're already paying you. While I appreciate the greed can be there, surely they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. There's many people who would pay who find advertising toxic and they have such huge volumes at free level that they'd be able to make a lot off a low impression cost.

npongratz 9mo ago
The progression of the cable TV industry shows many people are more than happy, or apathetic enough, to allow the industry to double-dip.
- Quarrelsome 9mo ago
  basic people sure, but the early internet showed an extremely strong demand for a better service than cable TV. When that demand is there then people will start seeking other options and building bridges of convenience to help the basic people also port over.
- Workaccount2 9mo ago
  Cable TV is a bad analogy because it was a natural monopoly. Even the disruption route (satellite TV) was another natural monopoly. Netflix doesn't have the moat of "built a physical wire connection to every persons home" that cable TV enjoyed.
  - mananaysiempre 9mo ago
    The moat is the leverage to get licensing deals using the size of the existing user base. You could bootstrap a movie rental business by buying DVDs from a DVD store (then eventually from a DVD distributor, etc.). You cannot bootstrap a movie streaming business by buying streaming rights because nobody will sell them to you. They hardly even sell them to Netflix anymore. The Internet Archive tried to get around the same issue for ebooks by scanning physical books and renting the scans (and not being a business), and it nearly cost them everything.

kristianc 9mo ago

No, there's GSuite / Google Workspace instead. OpenAI doesn't have one of those.

MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
Even if you (i.e. your company) pay for the top-tier GSuite subscription, you still don't get an ad-free Google Search. Very curious ...

skybrian 9mo ago

Maybe it’s “inevitable” in the long run, but Google didn’t start out plastering their search results with ads. They did very well with text-only ads in the margin, and it was a slippery slope from there, but it took decades. Also, they are still only running text-only ads, even though there are a lot of them. The timing isn’t inevitable. Is OpenAI going to speedrun to the endgame? Not sure they need to.

lkbm 9mo ago

> Google realized this a long time ago; there is no ad-free paid version of Google Search. Ad-free YouTube costs $14 a month (and the creators get a higher payout from premium user views than they do from the free, ad-viewing users).

MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
Video ads are less lucrative than ads alongside search, which can be a lot more closely tailored to both the user and the search results at hand. The existence of YouTube Premium shows that Google is indeed willing to provide paid ad-free experiences so long as it nets them more revenue, and is strong evidence that the same is not true for search.
windexh8er 9mo ago
This isn't really true anymore. Most notable creators have "sponsored" content somewhere and ads in platforms don't have to be an explicit, traditional ad. Product placement for the sake of no other reason than product placement is also advertising. YT has more angles. That's really the point. And monetization is adjusted accordingly. Beyond all of this ads are more increasingly invasive due to the cat and mouse game of iteration. Personally, I bounce from sites where I can't get around a blocker. I also pay for content on sites where its worth it. But if I can't ever read anything on your site I'm just skipping it. If I really need / want to see something I'll go one level deeper, but that's a rarity these days. Everything is mostly in reprint somewhere else anyway. At the end of the day it's still simple sales: you have a product at a price point people can't refuse. That is the 5% of the clear web today and it shows in all the bullshit people are going through to protect their ad revenue.
prmoustache 9mo ago
Youtube premium is not ad-free.
- Workaccount2 9mo ago
  It is. I don't why people say this. They even include their own version of sponsor block, which is generous, because technically sponsor segments aren't even part of youtube, they are purely the creator deciding to make the ad part of their content. Also, just to put it out there, many creators would likley be able to cut sponsored content if the 40% of viewers not viewing ads paid up. Not every creator is a greedy ruthless overlord, many just want to keep the lights on. Especially in tech/nerdy channels, where ad block use is the highest.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

Bombthecat 9mo ago

All hail APIs!

Workaccount2 9mo ago

>Google realized this a long time ago; there is no ad-free paid version of Google Search. Google actually experimented with this about a decade ago (I know, I was one of the suckers who paid), but it got canned because why the fuck would you pay google when u-bloc is free? Companies absolutely will offer ad-free experiences. Google has youtube premium, which even compensates creators with half your sub as well. Evenly distributed too. People get wrapped around the axle of ad-subsidized models, the "I pay and still see ads" but they just are confused about a hybrid monetization structure. At some point the larger internet has to look itself in the mirror and recognize that it's either ads, credit card, or a hybrid of those. And no, blocking is not an option, it just offloads costs onto honest users.

prmoustache 9mo ago
> Companies absolutely will offer ad-free experiences. Google has youtube premium, which even compensates creators with half your sub as well. Evenly distributed too. Youtube premium is not ad-free, you still gets whatever ads are embedded in the actual content.
- Workaccount2 9mo ago
  YT premium comes with their own version of sponsor block, but you manually have to hit the skip button. But I don't hold youtube accountable for what creators decide to put in their videos. I would grind my axe with the creator instead, it's their video and their choice. Youtube gets no cut from those segments.
  - cruffle_duffle 9mo ago
    As a paid YouTube subscriber, I’ve always wondered if that skip was only for us. It would be kind of bullshit if it was also for ad-based free viewers too as it would imply that google is free to show you ads they make hard to skip but they make it easy to skip embedded promotions and stuff.
  - kamyarg 9mo ago
    This has been a life saver: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/ Crowd sourced in-video sponsor auto skip, I have been contributing to it myself as the UX is great.

NiloCK 9mo ago

Given this specific family of product, the ads are essentially baked in - medium is the message and all. LLM induced psychosis is one thing, but extremely subtle LLM induced brand loyalty or ideological alignment seem like natural attractors. One day a model provider will be 'found out' for allowing paid placement among its training data. It's entirely possible that free-tier LLMs won't need banner ads - they'll just happen to like Pepsi a lot.

AlexCoventry 9mo ago
This is what worries me the most. Marketing is ultimately a business of manipulation, and services like ChatGPT seem like excellent tools for manipulation. I wish OpenAI could find a less adversarial business model.

simianwords 9mo ago

There's absolutely no way this is happening. Want to bet?

simianwords 9mo ago

Strange that people even think this possibility is true. Name any other subscription that you can't use without ads? - youtube - hulu - netflix - spotify - photoshop I can't think of a single other one that one can use that still shows ads. Absurd proposition because llm's are more fungible and once you start forcing ads, competitors will barge in.

Brystephor 9mo ago

It also skews towards power users, as it allows for more ad inventory. If they're going to do an ad auction marketplace with bidding snd such then they're likely to rollout slowly to keep auction pressure and bids high enough. Expand to too much inventory and CPMs will drop like crazy.