Perplexity got ads • Hacker News Board

Re: Perplexity got ads

#271

Post by wrasee » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 2:49 PM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #222

wrasee wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> $5 is practically nothing

That’s quite a privileged thing to say. This forum is read by folk all across the world and I would say that it’s up to each individual to say how much $5 means to them.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#272

Post by wrasee » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 2:59 PM UTC

xigoi wrote: post #200

wrasee wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

According to Kagi, they can’t make the price much lower and still be profitable.

If they get 100x the customers on a $2 tier than a $5 tier then yes, they can be profitable.

The question is, could they get 100x? Or even 10x? I don’t know, and I assume they’ve done their homework and believe that they can’t. I just wonder, what if they’re wrong?

Re: Perplexity got ads

#273

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 3:04 PM UTC

chgs wrote: post #211

mojo74 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where you're based but I would offer the BBC TV - take your pick of classic shows. Radio - 6 music for me. Education - provides resources for all school key stages in line with the UK curriculum. Sports - a bit sporadic but you can get everything except baseball at some point in the year. Arts - broadcasts the Glastonbury festival. Live shows you can attend and be in the audience. All for £170 a year and…

only £170 because of the scale, it has 30 million subscribers paying £15 a month. Reduce those numbers and it’s a death spiral. It won’t last much longer, the fee itself has collapsed in real terms - 15 years ago it was 40% higher than today, the political pressure to remove it has never been higher, I’m expecting Musk to start attacking it more overtly soon.

I'm still unsure why the BBC doesn't make it possible to pay for a "license" outside the UK. At least, it didn't back in 2012.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#274

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 3:11 PM UTC

janalsncm wrote: post #177

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 effect…

I'm not switching the definition of decent. I'm noting what the actual effect of Spotify's business model and operations are. If you find it decent a user, and are OK with the long term impact, go ahead and use it. People just need to be reminded from time to time that their individual choices (as "users") have ramifications beyond whether they get decent service.

Also, as a side note: HN is a generally US-centric (and more broadly anglophone) context. The word "decent" in english currently has some related but not trivial to distinguish meanings. There's a British english version (now spreading into American english, certainly among younger cohorts) which equates roughly to "quality". There's also a version that is more related to some sense of morality. A "decent person" isn't so much about what they will do, as what they won't. There's the version used in the question "Are you decent?", asked before entering a room. This is partly why I asked what the OP meant.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#275

Post by DannyBee » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 3:15 PM UTC

Tostino wrote: post #148

Spivak wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There should be more people striving for sustainable businesses IMO.

SMBs have roughly the same characteristics even when they do that.

That is, the vast majority still fail, most do not make enough profit to come close to sustainability, and the 80-90% of revenue is earned by the top 10% of SMBs

Even if you go through the data and try to restrict it to some definition of "not going to be an obvious failure" it's not pretty.

It is a fascinating read though.

So while I agree with your sentiment it does not seem to help much in practice.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#276

Post by scarface_74 » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 3:29 PM UTC

fweimer wrote: post #221

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

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…

These two issues are directly correlated.

> 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

20K subscribers can’t support the creation of a quality search engine.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#277

Post by gjm11 » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 3:34 PM UTC

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 gladly affirm that in principle it is possible for advertisements to be beneficial on net by informing people with needs about how suitable products meet those needs.

Now turn off your ad-blocker, look at the next ten ads you see on the internet, and count how many of them fall into that category.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#278

Post by wrasee » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 3:38 PM UTC

i_am_proteus wrote: post #230

wrasee wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I suppose my argument was essentially that $5/month felt on the high side, so I love that the answer is actually to pay $10/month. This is the way.

In all seriousness, I am sure you are right and don’t deny the promise on offer. I’d also be willing to pay for search much more so than many other online services of more questionable value.

But I just don’t think they’re going to get cut-through at $5, not least $10, in the way they might exponentially do so if they could stretch to an entry tier that really starts to feel accessible to a much, much wider set of people.

WhatsApp took over the world at $1/year.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#279

Post by freediver » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 3:49 PM UTC

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…

> 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).

I will! (Kagi CEO here, and Happy New Year!)

It is closer to 0.01%, comparing the number of daily queries which is my favorite metric. Other way to put it is that Kagi is currently ~7 seconds of Google's daily search volume.

You may say it is a small number, but each one of Kagi's searches is paid and deliberate - and I dare say - a vote for the better web.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#280

Post by freediver » Sat, Jan 04, 2025, 3:58 PM UTC

tokioyoyo wrote: post #258

ryukoposting wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do consumers refuse to pay for search, or has nobody asked them if they'd want to? Kagi is well-known on HN, but I guarantee my parents have never heard of it. I told my wife about it the other day, and she had never heard of it either. She thought it was a cool idea. $10/month is just too much. Sure, YellowPages had lots of ads. Hell, PCMag was ~35% ads. The difference was that their ads were clearly labeled and phy…

No hate to Kagi, but my non-techie friends would laugh at my face if I suggested them to pay for a search engine. Us, people in engineering and web tech operate in a fairly different mindset. Ads piss us off more than the average people, who have accepted it throughout the years.

Send them this https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/why-pay-for-search.html many people have started thinking differently after reading it.

Trend wise I think it is like organic food - 30 years ago, many of us laughed at paying extra for it ("what's wrong with regular food?") But over time we started caring what we feed our bodies. The same shift is happening with information. It will not happen over night but we're starting to care more about the quality (and incentives) of what we feed our minds.