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Our approach to advertising

openai.com

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Re: Our approach to advertising

#191

Post by rishabhaiover »

johannesrexx wrote: post #184
jonplackett wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google also famously intent Isla made their search engine _worse_ so you have to look through more results, and then see more ads. The enshitificstion begins. The only saving grace is the promise to have an ad-free tier. If something is valuable to you, paying for it to not have ads is very reasonable.

The [enshittification]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification ) begins. Fixed that for you, and I agree fully with that assessment.

A plea to the wise members of this community, please stop using this word. Use degradation or decay but not this.

Re: Our approach to advertising

#192

Post by thmsths »

charcircuit wrote: post #152
czep wrote: post #121

> You need to know that your data and conversations are protected and never sold to advertisers. > we plan to test ads at the bottom of answers in ChatGPT when there’s a relevant sponsored product or service based on your current conversation. There is a severe disjoint between these two statements: the advertiser now knows what your conversation was about! This gives a lot of leverage to ad campaigns to design the t…

It doesn't know what it's about. It just knows that their product was relevant to it. I don't think this is a big deal. It's like saying that if a user downloads a gacha game, then the game studio learns that the user is likely interested in gacha games. Learning that a user was talking about gacha games with ChatGPT does not really give any additional information.

Hard disagree. Advertisers (or people with worse motives) will be very creative in how they use the targeting parameters offered by chatGPT ads and suddenly they can make educated guesses about groups or even individuals. I remember a couple years ago, someone posted a story about how they were able to circumvent Facebook rules and display ads for just one person: their roommates and used that to freak them out.

Re: Our approach to advertising

#193

Post by usef- »

rm445 wrote: post #162

People are reacting negatively to the ads, but there's a bigger point. This is bearish as heck for AGI. If OpenAI were recursively improving their general-computer-using agent, who was going to be superhuman at every job, they wouldn't need to be messing around with things like this. ChatGPT is a useful product, which they're monetising in a well-travelled internet company way. The bad news is you're going to have ad…

Yes, it means they don't expect fast takeoff in the next year, but we already knew that.

Having revenue from their free users might can just be a way to make it more sustainable. And/Or make fundraising easier from investors (which has immediate benefit).

Seeing the message "you're reached your limit..." makes free users switch to other AI providers, and ads are a way to fund higher limits. Their prime competitor, Google, has ad income from users so has an advantage.

Re: Our approach to advertising

#194

Post by usef- »

falloutx wrote: post #179
Anon1096 wrote: post #166

Interesting that OpenAI is trying to hammer the point that they won't sell user data to advertisers. That's how all the major ads platforms work. I don't personally agree that it constitutes "selling your data" but certainly people describe it that way for Google/Meta ads which function the same way. By framing it this way they're clearly trying to fool users who really bought into the messaging that Google et al lit…

I refuse to believe OpenAI wont sell the data. They will add the ads then couple days later you will "Change to our privacy policy". Thats how every company did it.

Having more data than others is a competitive advantage in both the ad and the ai industries. It's why Google and Facebook don't sell your data (unlike, eg, many medium-sized businesses today), they "just" collect it heavily.

Re: Our approach to advertising

#195

Post by scuff3d »

rm445 wrote: post #162

People are reacting negatively to the ads, but there's a bigger point. This is bearish as heck for AGI. If OpenAI were recursively improving their general-computer-using agent, who was going to be superhuman at every job, they wouldn't need to be messing around with things like this. ChatGPT is a useful product, which they're monetising in a well-travelled internet company way. The bad news is you're going to have ad…

It's almost like LLMs represents a fairly useful but modest step forward, instead of a complete and utter paradigm shift that will up end society and put everyone out of a job.

Re: Our approach to advertising

#196

Post by stubish »

When the training data is 'the Internet', I don't see why you would pay to relegate yourself to a box people will train themselves to ignore. Instead, why not astroturf and ensure the training data will promote you organically?

Re: Our approach to advertising

#197

Post by usef- »

observationist wrote: post #182
ed_mercer wrote: post #173

Lots of negative comments here. OpenAI has to make a move, they are not profitable and have massive costs and debt. I think this one of the least bad moves, given all data that they have on users. They could have monetized their data so much more, and sooner.

I think it's damning that they possibly have the most advanced AI on the planet right now, unfiltered, no guard rails, and as much compute as they could possibly want for deep reasoning and inference, and despite that, the best move they could make was enshittification. I've been bullish for OpenAI, but that's starting to fade. Sama is a master of the artful dodge, though, so it'll be interesting to see what happens.…

How do you propose they fund the free usage otherwise? They do offer a paid version without ads.

(typically the ~entire general public chooses the ads: see how ad-supported products beat paid in virtually every generation of tech)

Re: Our approach to advertising

#198

Post by usef- »

wat10000 wrote: post #45
torben-friis wrote: post #42

>In the coming weeks, we’re also planning to start testing ads in the U.S. for the free and Go tiers They didn’t even start with free, already a paid subscription included.

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

Why? It's a new tier that's lower-cost than the current paid version.

Re: Our approach to advertising

#199

Post by qotgalaxy »

usef- wrote: post #185
personjerry wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(In)famously, Google's motto used to be "Don't be evil" Scary to think about, if moving away from "Don't be evil" is the precedent for an "AGI company"

Are you defining "evil" as "has an ad-supported product"? In every tech generation, for good or bad, mainstream consumers choose the ad-based product over the paid product. So every company that wants scale in the long-term ends up adopting an ad-based free tier to avoid becoming niche, it seems. Even the majority of HN users now appear to use gmail despite paid email hosts being incredibly cheap. Edit: Not sure why…

[dead]

Re: Our approach to advertising

#200

Post by stubish »

schmichael wrote: post #189
falloutx wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$20/month product with ads, you would have to be an exec to think thats a good idea. Can they even push enough ads to ever make profit? Like the best care scenario for openAi at this point is to declare bankruptcy.

> $20/month product with ads That's a Netflix + Hulu subscription - with ads in both. Before streaming people regularly paid $50/mo (not adjusted for inflation) for cable TV with ads. While it's easy to bemoan Google pushing ads into every corner of our digital lives, I think they arguably offered an unprecedented level of services relative to the number of ads, and we all got used to that. Now whether OpenAI could e…

Maybe it is more successful elsewhere, but over here the type of ads and repetition make me think more money is spent on ad infrastructure than is gained in revenue (eg. three ads in a show, all identical, all advertising the platform you are watching). I'm left with the impression that the actual reason is not to sell ads, but to annoy customers into paying for higher tiers. It is not that we have gotten used to ads, but our dislike is being weaponized.
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