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Perplexity got ads

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Re: Perplexity got ads

#201

Post by franga2000 »

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

I doubt any LLM would, nor would I want it to. Their job is not to contradict the user with "their" opinion. If I want to hear good things about TurboTax, it better give them to me. It's already annoying enough when LLMs avoid "sensitive" topics because their owners fine-tuned them on their own "moral" views.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#203

Post by hosteur »

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

Well, 29K subscribers is quite alright considering that they are not doing any ads. So their marketing is largely word of mouth as I understand it.

Of course, they are not going to grow to the level of FANG with this approach but do they have to?

I am a very happy Kagi subscriber myself. And I loathe when I have to wade through SEO spam sites on the few occasions where I have to use Google, Bing, etc. due to being on someone else's computer.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#204

Post by thruway516 »

__rito__ wrote: post #136
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?

Perplexity has been the most accurate LLM product, and sans hallucination till date. It is also the fastest. It also has inline citation, but other products do, too. But at one time it was the only product in market to offer that. That's why I stick with Perplexity.

Perplexity is definitely not sans hallucination and its accuracy varies highly depending on the type of query. For me it occupied a niche hybrid spot between full blown Llms and 'dumb' search engines but that niche is increasingly being squeezed out on both sides as the big Llms add web capability with more structured results while Google etc get smarter. It is hard to see what unique value proposition they offer going forward and its no surprise theyre becoming more google-like everyday, in the negative sense, as they struggle to justify their sky high valuation to all the vc money that is propping them up.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#205

Post by cess11 »

bandrami wrote: post #175
imposterr wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe they have debt to pay off.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#206

Post by Retric »

edanm wrote: post #196
Tostino wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comp…

First, I think VC makes up a tiny percentage of invested capital, so I'm not sure the intuition of "so much money is thrown at it" is right. There's far, far more capital and talent in e.g. traditional non-software businesses, finance, government, etc. Just look at places like Google, which has 180k employees. Not all are tech/innovation talent, necessarily, but that's probably more than most new startups combined. I…

VC funded companies are into the trillions of total investment (100+B / year adds up). That’s a small but meaningful fraction of global wealth for such a tiny slice of companies. It’s not that these are necessarily bad investments, but growth at any cost tends to suck up a lot more talent than the business actually justifies.

Of course the industry is mostly dumb investments. Looking back Google+ was part of a wave of social websites that didn’t really go anywhere. Facebook was founded in 04, Twitter in 06, but in 2011 suddenly everyone wants in on the action… The wave of crypto was similarly almost pure waste but most VC firms aren’t really about wise investment. It’s about charging high fees for funds under managed, they succeed when someone invests not when companies become profitable.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#207

Post by pembrook »

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.

By doing well, you mean they’ve reached a user base that is 0.00001% the size of Google (feel free to “actually…” me with the correct number of zeroes).

If we want the productivity unlock of search (and AI) to be accessible to the entire world and not just to niche internet nerds who live and work online all day, we probably are going to get ads again. I’m sorry that this is true and has always been true. OpenAI is just a few years from admitting this themselves.

Even if they reach 100 million paid users at $20/m, it’s not enough to stay competitive given competition will offer a free product that shows ads to monetize the other 5 billion AI users on earth in addition to a pro subscription tier and will always have the superior model.

Not all humans are the same as you and care about the same stuff enough to pay for it, I know, it’s upsetting. But this is reality. And its better for the world. It helps the most people in a sustainable way.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#208

Post by j1elo »

wrasee wrote: post #173
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.

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 he…

Correction: $6.05 (in my case)

A while ago they sent me an email saying "we grew enough that now we are obliged to collect VAT from you", so the actual final price grew a bit.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#209

Post by chgs »

rhubarbtree wrote: post #180
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.

And at some point someone will say “we can increase revenue 10% by putting ads in” and the goose will survive because most people dont care

I cancelled prime and stopped sending amazon about £600 a year when they added adverts. They don’t care because 100 other people didn’t and they got an extra £10 a year from pushing them adverts.

Companies can’t resist the double dip, and the majority don’t care.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#210

Post by chgs »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #163
scarface_74 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The OP provided no evidence at all.
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