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Perplexity got ads

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Re: Perplexity got ads

#221

Post by fweimer »

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

I think it's a bit of a cultural defect that we consider a product with 29K (supposedly satisfied) users a failure.

More problematic (for Kagi) is that it's not a free-standing engine (“Our search results also include anonymized API calls to all major search result providers worldwide” per https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...), so it's still dependent on the weird business practices around non-paid search. I assume these other search providers wouldn't be able to provide API endpoints like this with just the business from API clients.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#222

Post by Aeolun »

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…

$5 is practically nothing. $2 is just not worth the cost of the CC charge.

I think it’s really convenient that you can pay for extra searches, as you never have to worry about actually running out.

They also need to be able to pay for the servers that run searches.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#223

Post by Aeolun »

pembrook wrote: post #207
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.

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 j…

I don’t think ads fundamentally help people.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#224

Post by Dalewyn »

elorant wrote: post #215
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…

You're oversimplifying the narrative. It's not ads per se that bother. It's the tracking part. Make ads contextual like they used to be and there's no problem at all, actually they might turn to be interesting. Keep tracking me all over the web and you grow the desire in me to block the living shit out of everything.

>It's not ads per se that bother. It's the tracking part.

I couldn't care less about tracking.

No, the reason I block malvertisements is because they are malicious. Malvertisements are viruses and you cannot convince me otherwise, I cannot find any difference. Blocking malvertisements are a matter of fucking safety.

What? We're talking about advertisements? No, all advertisements are malvertisements.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#225

Post by risyachka »

sandspar wrote: post #108
risyachka wrote: post #66

It’s ironic that most people have jobs in the first place thanks to ads but hate on ads every day. Without ads the world would basically stop, they drive the businesses, each and every one. It’s a necessary evil that will always be in most popular products, especially considering most people want to get all value for free.

Ads haven't always existed. Economies without them can exist and we can move toward one.

They have existed since humans could write or talk.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#226

Post by fweimer »

Spivak wrote: post #135
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.

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

For Kagi, there is a big question mark around the availability of the third-party search API endpoints they rely on. If search evolves further and further away from textual matching, that will impact them as well. (For search providers, it could be commercially reasonable to replace more or less traditional document indexing with a way to synthesize responses—at a very high level similar to what some analytical tools for time series do.)

I hope that by then, they have deployed their own crawlers and indices, so that there's still an alternative, rather than merely adopting the latest industry trends.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#227

Post by Aeolun »

jsheard wrote: post #25
amelius wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why do they need to choose the shittiest monetization model?

If you have a better idea for making AI chatbots profitable then I'm sure all the AI chatbot companies which are losing staggering amounts of money would love to hear it. The first step is to find any business model that works, shittily or unshittily.

Charge me for usage like they’re already doing?

Re: Perplexity got ads

#228

Post by maccard »

KMnO4 wrote: post #127
imposterr wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean Perplexity Pro? That thing they tried and found that no one was willing to pay for cuz users say they want paid options but then jump boat to the free things always? https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/faq/what-is-perplexity-pro

What's up with every AI company having a $0 plan and a $20 plan? I would pay for a lot more of these tools if they were $5 (obviously with less capability than a $20 plan), but I don't use any one enough to justify nearly $300/year (post tax).

Farther up, someone else was complaining about a different tool costing $5/mo but saying they’d pay $3/mo for it.

Everyone having a $20 price point probably means that that’s the point they think the customers will pay for it. Will introducing a $5/mo tier quadruple their paid user base? My guess is no, but that a lot of the people currently paying $20 will drop to paying $5

Re: Perplexity got ads

#229

Post by jasode »

elorant wrote: post #215
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…

You're oversimplifying the narrative. It's not ads per se that bother. It's the tracking part. Make ads contextual like they used to be and there's no problem at all, actually they might turn to be interesting. Keep tracking me all over the web and you grow the desire in me to block the living shit out of everything.

>It's not ads per se that bother. It's the tracking part.

No, people are irritated by just the existence of ads -- with-or-without the tracking.

E.g. the "native" advertising of sponsors embedded in Youtube videos or podcasts have no technical way to track the audience and yet people are still annoyed such that they use Sponsorblock to get rid of it. https://www.google.com/search?q=sponsorblock

Lots of ads-without-tracking still anger people. The commercials interrupting the tv and radio broadcasts, the ugly billboards around the city, etc. What gp is saying is that most of them would still listen to the radio "for free with the ads" rather pay extra for ad-free Sirius XM music or ad-free Spotify subscription. That majority preference is why ad-funded businesses dominate the paid-membership business models.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#230

Post by i_am_proteus »

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…

The "right way"[0] to use Kagi is the unlimited search tier ($10/mo) and then aggressively rank domains in searches. Within a few weeks, the search quality improves tremendously, because I have filtered out the domains responsible for low-quality results, and up-ranked the domains I find to be most useful.

[0]My opinion. Probably true.

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