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Our approach to advertising

openai.com

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Re: Our approach to advertising

#141

Post by wat10000 »

keybored wrote: post #88
wat10000 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Including advertising in a paid product should be punishable by public flogging.

What ought to be the punishment for falling for the line that paying for something means no ads?

Who says we're falling for it? I expect it, as in I believe that's how it should be. I know that offerings can change and that there are paid services that include ads. I know what I'm getting if I sign up for a paid plan with ads. I also think anyone who offers such a thing should be publicly flogged.

Re: Our approach to advertising

#143

Post by 9cb14c1ec0 »

I already don't use ChatGPT. I use OpenWeb UI with OpenRouter, and the API costs for my usage are peanuts. Switching to a different interface is so easy many people will. (You don't need to self host. T3 Chat, for example.) This is the difference between Google Search and ChatGPT.

Re: Our approach to advertising

#144

Post by [deleted] »

guelo wrote: post #116
beering wrote: post #49

I think Google has already shown that in the long run, people accept ads and prefer them to paying a subscription fee. If that weren’t true, then YouTube Premium would have double-digit % of youtube users and Kagi Search would be huge.

YouTube premium being $14 a month is a scam. I very much doubt that they earn $14/month out of my ad viewing.

[deleted]

Re: Our approach to advertising

#145

Post by 9cb14c1ec0 »

beering wrote: post #49

I think Google has already shown that in the long run, people accept ads and prefer them to paying a subscription fee. If that weren’t true, then YouTube Premium would have double-digit % of youtube users and Kagi Search would be huge.

The difference here is the qualitative difference that has existed between Google Search results and other competitors. Switching away from Google Search is a high friction move for most people. I'm not sure the same goes for AI chat.

Re: Our approach to advertising

#147

Post by antod »

fwlr wrote: post #44

If you had told me in 2011, when I first started discussing artificial intelligence, that in 2026 a trillion dollar company would earnestly publish the statement “Our mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity; our pursuit of advertising is always in support of that mission”, I would have tossed my laptop into the sea and taken up farming instead.

In 2011 I would've had trouble believing there could be a trillion dollar AI company, but that if there was such a company I could almost expect they would make such an asinine statement.

Re: Our approach to advertising

#148

Post by nerdsniper »

thornewolf wrote: post #34
bad_haircut72 wrote: post #7

Once they put ads in it the algorithms will optimize for engagement and time on platform, not returning useful (let alone correct) information. This works for Facebook cause Facebook is essentially entertainment, but I think this will kill ChatGPT as a useful tool.

while we can't trust their word as absolute truth, they did specifically say they still not do this in the article

Oh, you sweet summer child. Promises like these are made to be broken [0][1][2]. They would need a mechanism for contractual or regulatory enforcement for these words to carry any weight at all. What makes you think we should give these promises any more weight than promises that OpenAI already[3][4][5] broke?

0: "Every ad on Google is clearly marked and set apart from the actual search results." https://archive.md/fiK4E#selection-219.13-219.95

1: "Every Google result now looks like an ad" (which means every ad looks like a search result) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823

2: "Google breaks 2005 promise never to show banner ads on search results" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6605312

3: (2024) "OpenAI is developing Media Manager, a tool that will enable creators and content owners to tell us what they own and specify how they want their works to be included or excluded from machine learning research and training." https://openai.com/index/approach-to-data-and-ai/

4: (2023) "OpenAI promised 20% of its computing power to combat existential risks from AI — but never delivered" https://fortune.com/2024/05/21/openai-superalignment-20-comp...

5: (2025) "REPORT: The OpenAI Files Document Broken Promises" https://techoversight.org/2025/06/18/openai-files-report/

Re: Our approach to advertising

#149

Post by gtirloni »

To the people trying to read between the lines here, do you think OpenAI cares about what they said or didn't say and won't do a 180 if it means more profits? Like a blog post will stop them?

Re: Our approach to advertising

#150

Post by rpdillon »

satvikpendem wrote: post #115
qingcharles wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not how most users perceive it. To us techies, sure. Whenever I watch any regular person using Google though they invariably always click whatever the top result is (usually sponsored) and don't see any distinction.

Sure, but then the advertising model is working then, at least for Google and the companies that pay them. If people don't want to read a big heading literally called sponsored results [0] then I don't know what to tell them. Or they just don't care because they're not paying anything to click. [0] https://i.imgur.com/JvEsDpH.png

Good screenshot! Ads take up the majority of the space on that page, and are styled to look almost identical to search results. That's a problem for people like me that expect a search engine to primary deliver search results, not ads.
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