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Perplexity got ads

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Re: Perplexity got ads

#161

Post by edanm »

Tostino wrote: post #148
Spivak wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't ever get big with this scheme but you can be sustainable.

There should be more people striving for sustainable businesses IMO.

This is a very common sentiment on HN, but... why? I don't get it.

It's not like there aren't people focused on sustainable businesses. 90% of businesses are probably SMBs - just not in tech. For most people in the world, the word entrepreneur means "someone who's opening a McDonalds across the street" or "someone opening a pizza shop". Even in tech, there are plenty of not-hypergrowth companies around (I run a small dev shop, for example).

The reason we here are exposed more to VC-style startups is because a) they make more news, for obvious reasons, but also b) there are structural reasons in tech that favor that style of company, most importantly because software itself is scalable in a way that most things aren't.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#162

Post by visarga »

batata_frita wrote: post #122
nomilk wrote: post #120

What are the advantages of Perplexity over, say, ChatGPT? I use three LLMs atm (ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok), and have a decent sense for which is better at different tasks. For example, when asked about questionable web scraping ChatGPT and Claude give answers regarding ethics, whereas Grok gives more direct, technical response. What is Perplexity better than other LLMs at?

I've never figured out how to proper use it. Even it being "connected" to internet, the simple searches I've made it hallucinated.

The internet is full of spam and deceit, most of the time even we humans struggle. Even with good references, the models make their own share of mistakes.

Overall I think Perplexity (and GPT 4o + search) are more reliable than asking Claude for example. And in most cases using the LLM gives better results than wading through raw websites, with their dark patterns.

But we can use both in parallel and compare, if they agree, we can trust the result. If not, then we have a better staring point, and are warned to beware.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#163

Post by YetAnotherNick »

scarface_74 wrote: post #143
55555 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. A US google user's average value is $60 USD/month and ofcourse this is scaled up by those willing to pay who could be worth $200+ USD/month. (Napkin math)

That number is way off https://thenextweb.com/news/heres-how-much-money-you-made-go...

GP said US, which has the highest ad revenue per user. Your link doesn't have country divide.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#164

Post by Tostino »

edanm wrote: post #161
Tostino wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be more people striving for sustainable businesses IMO.

This is a very common sentiment on HN, but... why? I don't get it. It's not like there aren't people focused on sustainable businesses. 90% of businesses are probably SMBs - just not in tech. For most people in the world, the word entrepreneur means "someone who's opening a McDonalds across the street" or "someone opening a pizza shop". Even in tech, there are plenty of not-hypergrowth companies around (I run a small…

I'm not against using tech's natural advantages with scale - that's one of the beauties of software. My concern is with the disproportionate resources being poured into hyper-growth ventures, where the vast majority fail after burning through enormous amounts of capital.

If even a fraction of that talent and investment was redirected toward building sustainable businesses that create real value, rather than just competing for finite resources like user attention or market domination, I believe the tech industry, the tech workers, and society would benefit more in the long run.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#165

Post by bostik »

devsda wrote: post #147
pembrook wrote: post #123

Big surprise. It’s almost as if internet 1.0 shook out the way it did for a reason, and for all the complaining about ads, fast forward 25 years and consumers still fundamentally refuse to pay for search. It’s the same reason the phone book was also free and ad supported pre-internet. I don’t know why we can’t accept this reality and why we need to masochistically flog ourselves every time this is proven true over an…

> for all the complaining about ads, There are couple of main complaints about ads: 1. Too many of them plastered all over in least expected places. 2. All that is done to privacy in the name of accurate profiling and targeting. 3. Malicious and misleading ads. Should we accept that ad based industry can't survive without resorting to any of the above ?

You're asking the wrong question. Maybe we should be asking whether the ad industry deserves to survive if they have to (or choose to) resort to stalking and surveillance that would have made Stasi jealous.

It may not be possible to do anything about ads being misleading - marketing is just another word for lying and deception, after all.[ß]

For everything else you listed, I put together a tolerable set of behaviours a ~decade ago: https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html ; and if that makes online advertising a lot more expensive, well... have you considered that maybe the obnoxious, intrusive, scummy and/or malicious ads are everywhere because advertising is too cheap?

ß: fine, maybe some miniscule fraction (< 0.01%) are factual. I consider numbers of that magnitude rounding errors.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#166

Post by formerlurker »

nomilk wrote: post #120

What are the advantages of Perplexity over, say, ChatGPT? I use three LLMs atm (ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok), and have a decent sense for which is better at different tasks. For example, when asked about questionable web scraping ChatGPT and Claude give answers regarding ethics, whereas Grok gives more direct, technical response. What is Perplexity better than other LLMs at?

I do not know about Perplexity because I avoid it. Instead, I prefer and pay for Claude over Perplexity because Claude offers actual privacy protections. All other services take in my data and use it to further train their models and that does not sit well with me because I had a stalker. It’s obvious that Perplexity is following the Google route of using people as products.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#167

Post by stephencoyner »

shadowvoxing wrote: post #106

I use you.com and it has the latest greatest LLMs with no ads.

I’ve always found that you.com features are ahead of their time on paper, but the UX is so bad it’s hard to figure out how to get the most of it / keep me coming back. Great ideas and great technical founder, but just not a compelling product.

I just logged in now and they have a whole agents section with no clear value prop shown. I tapped on the “Genius Agent” and it seems like it just selected a “Genius” filter that had already been on the screen?

Re: Perplexity got ads

#168

Post by asdf147 »

rajup wrote: post #158
sandspar wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe YouTube can't exist without ads but the next thing might.

You can literally pay YouTube to avoid ads, watching the mental gymnastics folks on here do to complain about YouTube Premium is my favorite pastime.

Why would you pay for something that treats you as a product? I would gladly pay for youtube if there was: no paid sponsorships, no ads, no algorythm manipulations, no collection of behavioral information, no clickbaits, no shitty content promoted and so on and so. Basically a service where the side paying is a consumer, not a product. Paying for service that is already extracting value from you in ways that are not respectable is insane.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#169

Post by formerlurker »

behnamoh wrote: post #8
mikae1 wrote: post #2

Surprise! Companies eventually need to make some money.

perplexity already has a subscription plan...

Perplexity’s business model is still following the Google model of selling people to advertisers. The only LLM service with privacy protection I found so far is Claude. If I am paying for a subscription I would expect privacy to be included. How come people do not care?
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