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Perplexity got ads

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Re: Perplexity got ads

#321

Post by homebrewer »

carlosjobim wrote: post #311
wkat4242 wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$5 is nothing for Americans. Here in Spain with much lower purchasing power it's considerable and there's VAT added too.

So how long do you usually consider whether you're spending $5 or not?

I don't know about Spain, but $5 is enough to sustain me for half a day (I spend roughly $10 a day all things considered). There are many places out here where people have it much worse than we do. I will fret over spending an additional $5 per month for hours (by looking for alternatives, etc). GP is right, much of HN audience is extremely privileged and doesn't even recognize it.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#322

Post by chgs »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #273
chgs wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rights issues. Have international viewers of eastenders or Blue Peter and you have to pay the cast more, and pay more to license the music used in the background, etc.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#323

Post by carlosjobim »

homebrewer wrote: post #321
carlosjobim wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how long do you usually consider whether you're spending $5 or not?

I don't know about Spain, but $5 is enough to sustain me for half a day (I spend roughly $10 a day all things considered). There are many places out here where people have it much worse than we do. I will fret over spending an additional $5 per month for hours (by looking for alternatives, etc). GP is right, much of HN audience is extremely privileged and doesn't even recognize it.

Is somebody extremely privileged because they have $5? Or are you just upset that people would spend $5 differently than you would?

If you spend $10 per day, how can $5 be anything to fret about for hours? You're losing more spending your time fretting about it right?

Re: Perplexity got ads

#324

Post by formerlurker »

serial_dev wrote: post #193
formerlurker wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not know about Perplexity because I avoid it. Instead, I prefer and pay for Claude over Perplexity because Claude offers actual privacy protections. All other services take in my data and use it to further train their models and that does not sit well with me because I had a stalker. It’s obvious that Perplexity is following the Google route of using people as products.

Just curious, what’s the connection between you avoiding services training their models based on your data, and you having had a stalker? What kind of stalkers you had to consider this an attack vector?

The bad experience made me realize how easily the data I put out there can be used against me or nefariously. If you have daughters you may know about people making indecent photos or videos using their images. Someone in Eastern Europe actually made an AI app to undress people. What happens when if I share more personal details and the data is no longer considered mine?

Do I need to really elaborate on all the bad experiences people, women in particular, face? I thought these were well known by now.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#325

Post by Imnimo »

Setting aside the general question of Perplexity being an ad-supported service, I don't like that it's unclear exactly what the advertiser is sponsoring. Are they just paying for the suggested query to appear? Or do they also get a say in which sources the model uses to craft it's answer? Or even get to preview and approve the model's response?

Re: Perplexity got ads

#326

Post by Melatonic »

freediver wrote: post #279
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…

> 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 ea…

Great way to measure it actually - I suspect users of Kagi have a much higher average search volume than the average Google user. I know I definitely do.

Currently I think the only piece of clothing I own that has an actual logo on it is my Kagi T-shirt (for being an early subscriber) - you could say I am a fan :-D

Re: Perplexity got ads

#327

Post by Melatonic »

wkat4242 wrote: post #319
carlosjobim wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So how long do you usually consider whether you're spending $5 or not?

It's not about how long, it's about how often you decide not to do it. Which for me is pretty often. $5 is not one coffee here. It's about 4 coffees in a coffee bar. And that $5 is without VAT so that's enough for another coffee :) So basically it's a whole working week of morning coffees. To put it into perspective. This is why I think it has more chance to take off in America than here. Though northern European cou…

That totally makes sense. If we are estimating your purchasing power at 1/4x mine (I'm located in California and make decent money but not tech industry type money) I can see paying 40$ for the unlimited tier being much more of a consideration.

What does keep me paying personally though are three things:

1. I use search constantly for my job (and personal life) and Kagi makes me much more efficient compared to Google for both. I could easily filter out most ads for free with other tools - the ad free nature of Kagi is more of a plus on top personally than a main selling point.

2. While I generally avoid subscriptions 10$ per month is very little spread over days worked in a month. I comparatively probably spend much more for other things that benefit my job and personal life and bet you do too (better laptop - more reliable internet - etc etc). Even at 40$ a month (given your example) I would imagine it's a net benefit in terms of time savings per hour vs salary earned.

3. They are very transparent about new features and bugs fixed and blog updates and also are adding new features at a very impressive pace. There are lots of little things added that improve the experience and I don't see them buying into trends just for hype - everything's seems highly useful.

I also mostly drink loose leaf tea at home which can be either a hell of a lot cheaper than a daily coffee shop visit in either of our countries (mid tier tea in bulk) or a hell of a lot more expensive (fancy tea bought from smaller vendors). If I am ever going through a financial down period I can easily see myself choosing to go exclusively with the cheap bulk tea and keeping Kagi - total cost per work day for both would less than 50 cents USD / day.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#328

Post by r00tanon »

It's a tough game for Perplexity as long as they use Google's search, and with Google now providing "AI Summaries," and with the whole ad ecosystem (invented by Google) designed to turn us into predictable consuming robots, what's a pre-IPO company going to do? Fight the good fight and stick with a subscription model, or knuckle under and start sending us Google ads?

Sucks. I will say this though: as soon as I see ads in my Perplexity search results, I'm cancelling my paid subscription and simply going back to Google. Without any other differentiating feature set, why would I pay Perplexity?

RIP, Perplexity; it was good while it lasted.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#329

Post by pcchristie »

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…

>It helps the most people in a sustainable way.

Without taking this too seriously, define "sustainable." The free, ad-supported model is what has given us the social media companies, which has contributed hugely to making the global order look less sustainable than ever.

Re: Perplexity got ads

#330

Post by halJordan »

r00tanon wrote: post #328

It's a tough game for Perplexity as long as they use Google's search, and with Google now providing "AI Summaries," and with the whole ad ecosystem (invented by Google) designed to turn us into predictable consuming robots, what's a pre-IPO company going to do? Fight the good fight and stick with a subscription model, or knuckle under and start sending us Google ads? Sucks. I will say this though: as soon as I see ad…

Ads are already in the paid subscription (this is a thing they've telegraphed since the beginning of last year?) So you will definitely see them sooner rather than later. But i 100% agree. There's no real reason to pay for the privilege of ads.
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