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Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

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Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#21
post #19

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…

Counter example: Kagi.

Kagi is a niche product at best, with revenue literally orders of magnitude lower than Google's.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#22
There's no question that "AI" is the next advertising frontier. I've been saying this for years[1][2][3]. It is going to be the most lucrative form of it yet, and no "AI" company will be able to resist it. Given the exorbitant amount of resources required for this technology, advertising will probably be the only viable business model that can sustain it at scale.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35706981

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36689090

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46425948

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#23

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…

> 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

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#24
I'd pay $0.005 per conversation, provided the payment is not inconvenient, anonymous, and an account isn't required. That in my opinion is the root cause of the problem, people can't pay easily even if they wanted to pay instead of get ads.

I think the next natural evolution after showing ads in chat sessions is providing services where LLMs tailor site content to include ads in real time. Right now you get served a prepared advertisement after the bid is won and the ad for you is selected. With LLMs, both the bidding process and the ad served would be seamlessly integrated with the site content/context.

Part of the "problem" with ads is people know they're ads. What if this comment was edited by HN's servers and rephrased to mention a specific product? You might see a sentence about how OpenAI is the future, someone else might see how claude or anthropic are. Another person might see a paragraph from me about how I used Tide to clean laundry this morning with the help of AI, telling me the right portions for the right cloth. You might suspect it's AI but you won't always be able to tell. Even if they made it more obvious like how reddit is doing it, the content of the AD itself, pictures, text,etc.. could be crafted dynamically so that it embeds in your subconscious without much resistance.

The tech developed to make ads more effective is also used to influence people for other purposes. The current state of society came about after the widespread accessibility of smartphones, social media and the rise of surveillance capitalism. Russia's influence ops using ads is well documented for example. I mentioned all this to say how catastrophic the combination of LLMs and advertising could be, even by today's standards.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#25
post #14

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…

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.

You have no guarantee the API models won’t be tampered with to serve ads. I suspect ads (particularly on those models) will eventually be “native”: the models themselves will be subtly biased to promote advertisers’ interests, in a way that might be hard to distinguish from a genuinely helpful reply.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#26
AGI can have multiple meanings. Depending on who you ask, it can mean:

"Ads Generated Income"

"Artificial General Intelligence"

"A Google Imitator"

"Absolutely Great IPO"

It is any definition that fits the goal of the original secret definition of "100 Billion dollars in profits" from Microsoft and OpenAI [0].

[0] https://archive.is/nHedH

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#28
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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).

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#29
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You have no guarantee the API models won’t be tampered with to serve ads. I suspect ads (particularly on those models) will eventually be “native”: the models themselves will be subtly biased to promote advertisers’ interests, in a way that might be hard to distinguish from a genuinely helpful reply.

you mean the API response then will contain the Ad display code?

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#30
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter example: Kagi.

Kagi is a niche product at best, with revenue literally orders of magnitude lower than Google's.

Yes, but it is still a valid counterexample to:

> I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers

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