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I think this is a good moment to bring up a question I was thinking on earlier today. In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for servi

I think this is a good moment to bring up a question I was thinking on earlier today. In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product? And not just advertise in traditional sense (ads in ChatGPT), but general marketing and awareness of what you're offering. Google search ads? Agents aren't using Google. Launch on Reddit for humans and hope your post gets scraped? Write up a bunch of marketing blog posts and wait for LLMs to ingest your content and have it feed into the next generation of models? I honestly didn't quite know. If I were to launch a product today, I'd want it to be agent focused. But then how do you tell them about your product? Do these ChatGPT ads get returned if Codex does a web search? Is that good? Bad?

wslh 2mo ago
> In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product? The answer may still be the same: go where the attention is. Right now, that attention is concentrated in prompting frontends.
theplumber 2mo ago
You just do SEO ai (it’s a thing) ans buy ads from ChatGPT. It seems obvious to me
- MDib 2mo ago
  I wish I were joking but GEO (generative engine optimisation) has stuck from the 22-23ish period when Google was really pusing the 'Gen AI' brand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_engine_optimization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_engine_optimization
apitman 2mo ago
In my utopia traditional advertising doesn't exist. Products are in catalogs. When I want to buy something I look in the catalog under a specific category. Innovative products that actually bring value are spread by word of mouth.
- onestay42 2mo ago
  IIRC things like this were why so many companies were called ACME.
  - sebastiennight 2mo ago
    Soooo many companies in the French Yellow Pages with names that would translate to "AAA Plumbers", "A, A & Associates Locksmith Company"
    - kubanczyk 2mo ago
      ááattsistaawa means "rabbit, hare" for those who prefer real words (language of Blackfoot Indians, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%A1%C3%A1attsistaa- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%A1%C3%A1attsistaa-)
hermitcrab 2mo ago
>In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product? I've been running a 1-man software business for over 20 years and it is getting increasingly hard. I no longer get impressions from PPC Ads unless I bid so high that I make no profit. Magazine ads aren't really a thing now. The AIs are stealing my content and SEO works less and less. The channel is being flooded with low effort slop. Traffic to my website is steadily going down. It is hard to know what to do about it. Maybe I can buy some clicks from ChatGpt ads at a price where I can make profit, before the prices rise out of reach?
kimjune01 2mo ago
In a chatbot-first world, it's gonna have to either be generic impression ads that race to the bottom or contextual recommendations. Of course, the fear is that the advertiser hoards personal data or the chat answers are skewed to make you spend more money. Those concerns can be resolved by decoupling the text generation from the recommendation engine. It works by casting your intent and match it up with an advertiser's in a secured environment where the advertiser doesn't actually get to see your chats. For example, if you are talking about knee pain during trail running, the recommendation engine might cast "knee pain for runners" and either a shoe company or a physiotherapist would bid against that in an embedding space. Because the recommendation engine is an opt-in module for publishers and users, it's game-theory welfare maximizing. I talk a lot more about this on my blog, it goes on for quite a while. https://www.june.kim/vector-space https://www.june.kim/vector-space The exchange is live, with no publishers or advertisers. https://vectorspace.exchange/ https://vectorspace.exchange/

wslh 2mo ago

> In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product? The answer may still be the same: go where the attention is. Right now, that attention is concentrated in prompting frontends.

theplumber 2mo ago

You just do SEO ai (it’s a thing) ans buy ads from ChatGPT. It seems obvious to me

MDib 2mo ago
I wish I were joking but GEO (generative engine optimisation) has stuck from the 22-23ish period when Google was really pusing the 'Gen AI' brand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_engine_optimization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_engine_optimization

apitman 2mo ago

In my utopia traditional advertising doesn't exist. Products are in catalogs. When I want to buy something I look in the catalog under a specific category. Innovative products that actually bring value are spread by word of mouth.

onestay42 2mo ago
IIRC things like this were why so many companies were called ACME.
- sebastiennight 2mo ago
  Soooo many companies in the French Yellow Pages with names that would translate to "AAA Plumbers", "A, A & Associates Locksmith Company"
  - kubanczyk 2mo ago
    ááattsistaawa means "rabbit, hare" for those who prefer real words (language of Blackfoot Indians, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%A1%C3%A1attsistaa- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%A1%C3%A1attsistaa-)

hermitcrab 2mo ago

>In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product? I've been running a 1-man software business for over 20 years and it is getting increasingly hard. I no longer get impressions from PPC Ads unless I bid so high that I make no profit. Magazine ads aren't really a thing now. The AIs are stealing my content and SEO works less and less. The channel is being flooded with low effort slop. Traffic to my website is steadily going down. It is hard to know what to do about it. Maybe I can buy some clicks from ChatGpt ads at a price where I can make profit, before the prices rise out of reach?

kimjune01 2mo ago

In a chatbot-first world, it's gonna have to either be generic impression ads that race to the bottom or contextual recommendations. Of course, the fear is that the advertiser hoards personal data or the chat answers are skewed to make you spend more money. Those concerns can be resolved by decoupling the text generation from the recommendation engine. It works by casting your intent and match it up with an advertiser's in a secured environment where the advertiser doesn't actually get to see your chats. For example, if you are talking about knee pain during trail running, the recommendation engine might cast "knee pain for runners" and either a shoe company or a physiotherapist would bid against that in an embedding space. Because the recommendation engine is an opt-in module for publishers and users, it's game-theory welfare maximizing. I talk a lot more about this on my blog, it goes on for quite a while. https://www.june.kim/vector-space https://www.june.kim/vector-space The exchange is live, with no publishers or advertisers. https://vectorspace.exchange/ https://vectorspace.exchange/