Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Perplexity got ads

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 369 posts

Re: Perplexity got ads

#231

Post by pembrook »

Aeolun wrote: post #223
pembrook wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except they do. They help connect buyers with needs/wants to sellers with solutions.

I know this breaks HNs brain so I don't expect to win this one however.

Can ads encourage people to buy stuff they don't need? Yes. Like most things (including humans), they aren't perfectly rational.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#232

Post by Ferret7446 »

hosteur wrote: post #203
scarface_74 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

They do if they want to demonstrate that paying is a viable alternative to ads, and not just a niche curiosity.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#233

Post by schmorptron »

I'm conflicted on this. I use perplexity at the moment because they gave out a year of pro subscriptions, and it's geuninely pretty useful since it is so heavily based on web results. The one gpt wrapper product that I've liked so far.

With the actual model producers now also adding web search, the question is how long they will survive and how much value they can realistically add. The third-party models are also nerfed with less context length, and also seem less capable overall when comparing sonnet on perplexity to sonnet in the claude interface.

It makes sense that when the massive funding runs out these companies won't be able to offer free plans without ads or anything, still sucks.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#234

Post by bdangubic »

pembrook wrote: post #231
Aeolun wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think ads fundamentally help people.

Except they do. They help connect buyers with needs/wants to sellers with solutions. I know this breaks HNs brain so I don't expect to win this one however. Can ads encourage people to buy stuff they don't need? Yes. Like most things (including humans), they aren't perfectly rational.

I agree except when it is overwhelming. ads are so prevalent these days that many brains (mine included) look at every ad as a scam

Re: Perplexity got ads

#235

Post by lmm »

asdff wrote: post #85
lmm wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is the world's fourth most valuable company.

And phillip morris was one of the best performing stocks for nearly a century. past performance in the market is not always indicative of strong collective benefits.

I'm not saying they're a force for good. But they're more than viable as a company.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#236

Post by adaptbrian »

bdangubic wrote: post #234
pembrook wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they do. They help connect buyers with needs/wants to sellers with solutions. I know this breaks HNs brain so I don't expect to win this one however. Can ads encourage people to buy stuff they don't need? Yes. Like most things (including humans), they aren't perfectly rational.

I agree except when it is overwhelming. ads are so prevalent these days that many brains (mine included) look at every ad as a scam

It just depends where you consume media. I've never felt so unreachable (via ads) online in 25 years of using the internet for play and work.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#237

Post by edanm »

Retric wrote: post #206
edanm wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Yeah, they're into trillions, but aren't they like 5% of most pension funds, which are the biggest stores of wealth?

Also, if you're looking at trillions invested, I'd hardly call them startups or speculative investments. It's certainly true that something like OpenAI or Uber spent (and still spend?) many years without making profit, but by the time they're raising rounds of billions, it's no longer anywhere near the same level of risk, and the statistic that "most fail" rings less true.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#238

Post by carlosjobim »

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.

Kagi has a very tiny user base and is barely growing. But they're paying their own bills, at least.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#239

Post by zx8080 »

bostik wrote: post #165
devsda wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> have you considered that maybe the obnoxious, intrusive, scummy and/or malicious ads are everywhere because advertising is too cheap?

On contrary, probably the ads became so expensive that only scam can afford it.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#240

Post by carlosjobim »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #232
hosteur wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Of course, they are not going to grow to the level of FANG with this approach but do they have to? They do if they want to demonstrate that paying is a viable alternative to ads, and not just a niche curiosity.

Almost every business in the world outside of Silicon Valley is a niche business. And these are still brands that every one of us are familiar with, employing thousands and making healthy profits.
Post reply on HN