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Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

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Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#11

Post by MontyCarloHall »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #8
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #6

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…

> 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.

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.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#12

Post by [deleted] »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #8
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #6

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…

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#13

Post by woeirua »

People are a bit too eager to jump on the emergence of ads as an indicator that things are slowing down. I view it as the opposite, mostly because of my experience with Codex 5.2 and Opus 4.5. These models are incredible. I think by some definitions they’re already AGI.

So why bake in ads? My hunch is that raising funds privately can only take you so far. To keep scaling, they need more capital and have to go public. Despite all the hype they still have to show _some_ revenue to help justify the valuation they need to keep buying hardware. They are a business after all. Ads to support the lowest tiers feel like a no brainer. People already accept them for search.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#14

Post by andy99 »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #6

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.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#16

Post by OptionOfT »

I remember when Netflix took out a whole page ad for their Orange is the new Black show.

John Oliver had a piece on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc

This is a natural extension of it.

But what is revolutionary is the scale that this is now possible.

We have so many people out there who now blindly trust the output of an LLM (how many colleagues have you had proudly telling you: I asked Claude and this is what it says ).

This is as advertiser's wet dream.

Now it's ads at the bottom, but slowly they'll become more part of the text. And worst part: you don't know, bar the fact that the link has a refer(r)er attached to it.

The internet before and after LLMs is like steel before and after the atomic bombs.

Anything after is contaminated.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#17

Post by conception »

philipwhiuk wrote: post #8
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #6

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…

> 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.

Once the ad people are the ones making decisions because they are bringing in all/most of the money, inevitably it happens.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#19

Post by dsr_ »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #6

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.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#20

Post by MontyCarloHall »

andy99 wrote: post #14
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #6

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.

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.
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