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Perplexity got ads

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Re: Perplexity got ads

#171

Post by swyx »

plagiarist wrote: post #18
talldayo wrote: post #3

I like how AI generated ads tacitly confirm that advertisement was never about exposure and introducing people to new things. No, it's about automating deception on a grand scale and awarding the people that can most effectively control an audience. Why is TurboTax the best way to file my taxes, anyways?

Because of regulatory capture. In essence, TurboTax has been able to purchase legislators who then ensure that tax law is difficult for regular people. This creates a larger market for TurboTax. That's similar (albeit less awful, I admit) to how for-profit prisons are able to purchase legislators to ensure that they are able to fill their cells. There are some countries that have managed to avoid having tax prep soft…

never let turbotax bury this train wreck of a podcast https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/21/24273820/intuit-ceo-sasa...

Re: Perplexity got ads

#172

Post by submeta »

I pay for Perplexity (and for Anthropic and for OpenAI and lots of other services) just so I don’t see ads. I absolutely detest ads. That’s why I hardly use Google anymore because its results are polluted, both search results and images. The results are not authentic (anymore). So this is a very bad move by Perplexity.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#173

Post by wrasee »

chrisweekly wrote: post #133
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…

Yet Kagi is doing well, and I'm very happy to pay a few bucks a month to be their customer instead of their product.

Genuinely interested. So I went to their site and I have to say it's quite refreshing.

But then - a few bucks a month turns out to be $5/month, and that comes with a limit of 300 searches/month. That's an average of just 10 a day and while in practice I probably wouldn't actually hit that limit it's uncomfortably low enough that the added fiction of each search having a tangible cost is just a non-starter.

I can't help feel that when the competition is free - and on precisely the recognition that people don't pay for search - that a more aggressive $2 tier for personal customers could get a much wider penumbra of folk such as myself over the line, rather than be yet another $5 service that when applied consistently actually start to add up.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#174

Post by [deleted] »

scarface_74 wrote: post #137
chrisweekly wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet Kagi is doing well, and I'm very happy to pay a few bucks a month to be their customer instead of their product.

Kagi has around 200K subscribers. I wouldn’t call that “doing well”. Edit: that should be 29K subscribers

[deleted]

Re: Perplexity got ads

#175

Post by bandrami »

imposterr wrote: post #92
coder543 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Hundreds of thousands of people" are paying $20/mo for it, according to the CEO.[0] That seems like a very respectable place for such an early product to be. It is extremely far from "no one". [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWPmu_rKxJo&t=185s

Even if we say 1M people pay $20/month, that's only $240M/year. That's not enough to continue to grow and support the free users sans-ads.

Why would they need to grow? If the revenues exceed the costs that's a viable business model right there.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#176

Post by yapyap »

rchaud wrote: post #138

Interesting that the ad is for TurboTax of all things. As a non-user, would Perplexity attempt to answer the question of "Why is TurboTax the best tax filing software?" with a response that cites the many efforts TurboTax has made to block a free public alternative? TurboTax’s fight against free tax filing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31072202

> As a non-user, would Perplexity attempt to answer the question of "Why is TurboTax the best tax filing software?" with a response that cites the many efforts TurboTax has made to block a free public alternative?

I dont use perplexity either but obviously no, advertisers would pull out immediately if that happened

Re: Perplexity got ads

#177

Post by janalsncm »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #63
aaomidi wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify but for video media.

Ah, so a slow replacement of human created culture by AI feel-alikes, all while almost nobody who creates anything gets paid. Not precisely what I had in mind from the term "decent". ps. I know that for most users of Spotify, the above description of the service doesn't correspond to their reality. But it is an accurate description of the service, nevertheless.

I feel like this is a bad-faith response, no offense. A person explained why cable TV is a bad deal and wished there was a “decent” alternative. Clearly, “decent” is being used from the user perspective, not the effect it has on society.

From the user perspective Spotify is indeed “decent”. On-demand, unlimited access to essentially all music for a flat fee.

But switching the definition of “decent” to what its effects on society are seems unfair. It’s not like the price gouging cable business model has avoided race to the bottom reality TV either.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#178

Post by bandrami »

mikae1 wrote: post #2

Surprise! Companies eventually need to make some money.

It's crazy how much of the 2010s was both companies and consumers ignoring this, like Wile E. Coyote not noticing he's already off the edge of the cliff.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#180

Post by rhubarbtree »

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…

ChatGPT has ten million paying users.
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