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I built a demo of what AI chat will look like when it's “free” and ad-supported

99helpers.com

151–160 of 317 posts

Re: I built a demo of what AI chat will look like when it's “free” and ad-supported

#151
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creators including ads in their videos are not part of youtube. Youtube does not get a cut from those ads or play any role in making them. I know it's confusing, but those ads are part of the creator's videos that the creators put there themselves with deals they brokered outside of youtube. Youtube likely tolerates it because even with a 60% revenue share going go creators, often half of viewers pay nothing (no ad v…

YouTube Premium still has """promotional""" content (read: ads). Ad cards, ad footers, etc. https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/s/8CHWGReiQt

And your evidence is a screenshot in a reddit post from 2 years ago? Rather than "Open the app and check", which I did, and there a no ads. Nor have I ever seen that promo from the screenshot, or any of those other things you mention.

I'm guessing you are complaining about something that you don't even have?

Re: I built a demo of what AI chat will look like when it's “free” and ad-supported

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Examples would be the best way to prove me wrong. Most (all?) streaming services offer an ad-free plan, and those are the most popular hybrid payment services by far.

Cable TV in the 80s started out ad free. Then they realized they could only grow revenues at the rate they wanted with ads.

> Ideally without using the one counter example of cable TV in the 90's. Monopolies bring bad behaviors.

Re: I built a demo of what AI chat will look like when it's “free” and ad-supported

#153

It’s strange to see extreme amount of hysteria on this. There’s enough market competition to not allow this. If ChatGPT is doing it then just move to Claude. If all are doing it then surely opensource models are a good alternative. But i think leaning into the hysteria provides some comfort

> There’s enough market competition to not allow this.

Why do people think it will NOT happen? There are tons and tons of examples out there where it happened exactly like this over and over again. Why would AI suddenly be the exception?

It's really not about competition. It's about who gets the users first and/or does the best marketing

Re: I built a demo of what AI chat will look like when it's “free” and ad-supported

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube Premium Lite! You know, with ads. That you pay to watch.

I never understood this with cable TV either. You could use an antenna and watch TV over the air (with ads) or you could pay for cable and still watch ads!

Cable at least made sense on paper (if not obvious to the consumer). The channels were independent companies, they pay for the rights to content and get paid by ads. But they had the problem of how to actually get their feed into your home (over the air broadcast was the only D2C option).

The cable provider was just a delivery mechanism. So you pay them to deliver the feeds. But they didn’t get any revenue from the content providers (or their ads).

In other words, two different companies, two different services (content vs delivery), and two different revenue models.

Re: I built a demo of what AI chat will look like when it's “free” and ad-supported

#156

It's quite hard to tell what is satirical AI Ads and what is this 99helpers.com site, which is also really covered in pushy messages and trying hard to sell me something. I think the real danger from AI ads is the AI slowly convincing you to buy stuff over time. It's going to be super effective with the less technically adept.

> the real danger from AI (ads) is the AI slowly convincing you to ${GOAL:-buy stuff} over time.

(man bash: ${X:-abcde} means use value of X else abcde by default )

where GOAL can be anything one may be persuaded into. Choosing $15 burger over $7, brand X over brand Y, notion of X wholesale (to EV or not to EV), Elections, climate-this-or-that, ...

People are massively using it as search engine. So it does not need to lie, just can "spare"/not-show some results that do not match the GOAL..

extra: like 25th frame in 24frame video.. like, last word at each sentence is part of another 5-word goal-sentence.. repeated across 20 sentences..

IMO the "text exegesis" (i.e. what particular text actually means) may need resurrecting as discipline, and not only in higher-education / academia but down into school.

scraping all history every time may or may not be possible..

should one have like 5 accounts and share them with 10 people? across the globe?

mmh. interesting times ahead

Re: I built a demo of what AI chat will look like when it's “free” and ad-supported

#157
post #28

You forgot the part where they charge you to get rid of the ads but then the ads come back anyway so you're paying to be the product.

Paying to get rid of ads is paying for the privilege of doing their market segmentation for them. It's paying to segment oneself into the upper echelons of the market. People who pay to avoid ads have a lot of disposable income, the value of their attention increases.

I wish uBlock Origin would incorporate AI features too. It could automatically detect brand names and product placement and blank it all out. Works on images and video. Augmented reality glasses with uBlock Origin would be life changing.

Re: I built a demo of what AI chat will look like when it's “free” and ad-supported

#158
post #2

We all know the pattern: something useful launches → it becomes popular → it needs to make money → ads everywhere. AI chat is heading the same way. So I built a fully interactive demo that shows what an ad-supported AI chatbot could actually look like: https://99helpers.com/tools/ad-supported-chat It includes every monetization pattern you can think of: - Pre-chat interstitials (like YouTube pre-rolls, but for chat)…

Are you selling insights from chat logs too? Until you're monetizing my health, sex life and snitching to any government agency with a shiny nickel, you're playing in the shallows.

> snitching to any government agency with a shiny nickel

No, no, no. Not any agency.

You of course auction that information off to the highest bidding agency, ie. the one who is most desperate to meet their monthly quota.

Re: I built a demo of what AI chat will look like when it's “free” and ad-supported

#159
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also ruins the ability to use AI to help decide between products. Right now I can use AI chat to decide which two products best meet my specific needs. Once ads are present in all of them I'll be haunted by any queries made about specific products.

I'm curious how often you find factual inaccuracies in the LLM responses when doing that. I've found that more often than not, it gets at least one key feature/option/etc. outright wrong whenever I've tried that, making it effectively useless for me. Since I need to verify the exact information myself anyways, I'm 90% the easy to just having the different items in comparing up in side-by-side browser tabs, anyways.

I usually use it for sub $10 things (mostly groceries) and I'm actively grocery shopping when I do it. So say I'm standing in the store trying to decide between 8 different yogurts all of which have different sales going on and different servings sizes, so instead of having to flip over and read all the 8 brands and do math to equalize everything myself I take a photo of the shelf and ask Gemini which one has the most protein per dollar. It usually gets it pretty accurate, I'm doing the math to check in my head but it's just a time saver to not have to fuss every single time there's a sale. But it's not just yogurt it's lots of things, like debating chicken vs beef meatballs or which of the breakfast cereal is closest to the current favorite because I don't want to have to go to an extra store because this one doesn't have it. When I first got Claude I was determined to save $200 having spent the $200 on Claude and I would say it did manage to assist in grocery shopping sufficiently to make it worthwhile. It also helps keep a running memory for me about prices of certain things, did you know the prices for Bonne Maman chocolate hazelnut spread have been fluctuating by $4 it goes from $4.50 to $8.50. I take photos of the eggs section and ask what's the best hen care to price this week. Probably the biggest oops I've had doing this was asking it how to replace my bicycle freewheel, and it told me to watch a video, order the part, only to discover I'm not strong enough by far and the real solution was to pay the guy at the bike shop 10 dollars to do it with his giant vise grip + special freewheel tool. I did have to pay bike shop guy an extra 10 dollars too for him to fix my own attempt that almost ruined the whole wheel.

Re: I built a demo of what AI chat will look like when it's “free” and ad-supported

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, if a company gets enough leverage the top plan will demand both payment and ads. We've seen it before and we'll see it again.

Examples would be the best way to prove me wrong. Most (all?) streaming services offer an ad-free plan, and those are the most popular hybrid payment services by far.

I don’t know what you consider to be an advertisement but just off the top of my head:

Many (most?) streaming services advertise their own shows and other content ahead of other content you elect to watch even on ad free subs.

Hulu’s ad free subs have some shows that show unambiguous ads.

Prime and others muddy their interfaces with others’ “channels” and content that you can subscribe to through their service. They also show other content you can purchase or rent through them that aren’t part of your package. These things are included in search, viewing UI lists, and banner ads.

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