Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy • Hacker News Board

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#361

Post by johnnienaked » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 9:57 PM UTC

bearjaws wrote: post #62

There is something to be said about the state of advertising. Increasingly it seems you must go to the almighty Google or Meta in order to launch any business. We're looking to expand into a new business line and have out grown our pharmacy capacity. The new business line will cost about $2M in software dev, and $3M for the new facility. The advertising budget? $40,000,000 (annual). We can build 10 robotic pharmacies…

The solution is to prevent the privatization and wealth accumulation that flows from control of infrastructural technology platforms. Netscape, google, computer os, machine learning were all public or university research projects until the first movers (andreeson, brin/page, Ellison, gates) stole them, gatekept and IPed them, and then exploited wide user base to accumulate absurd amounts of wealth for just themselves. These people either didn't create anything at all or made very slight variations before deploying them. They were smart in seeing the trends before they happened, but should they really be entitled to 50% of a countries wealth just because they were lucky enough to be first? Especially now that we see how they behave once they get that control?

There is no reason at all why the US govt. can't control this better, they just refuse to do so.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#362

Post by emil-lp » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 9:58 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #307

emil-lp wrote: post #234

The title is actually The A in AGI stands for Ads Not Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

This is standard HN moderation. The title was linkbait, so we changed it. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html : " Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait ". Note the unless. When we do this, we try to find a representative phrase from the article itself that accurately and neutrally represents what the article is about. There is nearly always one of those if you look for i…

Thank you for your service, dang. You do a great job keeping HN a great site. I disagree with your decision regarding changing the title, though. Yes, it's tongue-in-cheek, but I wouldn't call it bait.

I wonder how HN anno 1968 would have moderated "Go To Statement Considered Harmful". *

* Amusing side note: Dijkstra's submitted title was actually "A Case Against the Goto Statement" but the editor editorialized it.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#363

Post by johnnienaked » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 10:02 PM UTC

csense wrote: post #209

bearjaws wrote: post #62

There is something to be said about the state of advertising. Increasingly it seems you must go to the almighty Google or Meta in order to launch any business. We're looking to expand into a new business line and have out grown our pharmacy capacity. The new business line will cost about $2M in software dev, and $3M for the new facility. The advertising budget? $40,000,000 (annual). We can build 10 robotic pharmacies…

Advertising spend being too high is a symptom of a supply glut. Too many products in the marketplace, not enough consumers to buy them. In a different world where there are higher wages, more people would have more spending power. Then companies wouldn't have to spend as many dollars on advertising, which they could split between higher wages, higher margins and lower prices. Alas, the short-term single-firm directio…

I don't think that's how it works. These companies have all the visibility control and make you invisible by default unless you pay them. It has very little to do with quality, demand, or any of the rest.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#364

Post by ossa-ma » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 10:03 PM UTC

dmurray wrote: post #348

> 2029: $50.00 (Suuuuuuuper bullish case) - Approaching Google’s ~$60 ARPU. By now, the infrastructure is mature, and "Conversational Commerce" is the standard. This is what Softbank is praying will happen. There's no way Softbank's, or any other investor's, extreme bull case is that four years from now, ChatGPT sells the same amount of advertising as Google and earns $50 a year. The extreme bull projection is that e…

I meant super bullish from an outsiders point of view, but I do agree that the projections from within the investors circle are likely multiples of that.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#365

Post by dgroshev » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 10:04 PM UTC

I wish we collectively had a better understanding of those ad tech shifts being fundamentally zero sum.

If we treat marketing as a black box, where are the benefits from supposedly more efficient marketing? Ad budgets are the same. People have the same amount of disposable income (or less, really). So on the both sides of the box converting ad budgets into paying customers the sum is the same. Quasi-monopolistic ad networks (Google and Meta) just hoovered up the money that previously went into other ad spaces, like local papers. Now OpenAI is going to fight for the same pie.

Ad tech is a market failure.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#366

Post by johnnienaked » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 10:05 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #351

pepinator wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it surprises me how many people simply don't get the point. they say "they make more money this way, so it's ok". no big picture at all.

What big picture? Can you elaborate, or just snide drive-by criticisms? I mean I understand that a lot of people in this comment section wish ads didn’t exist and that everyone just automatically knew about relevant products and services without ads, but it all reads like utopian fantasy stuff.

Do you genuinely believe the economy didn't function prior to the invention of the advertisement?

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#367

Post by johnnienaked » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 10:08 PM UTC

hansvm wrote: post #199

Aurornis wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The new business line will cost about $2M in software dev, and $3M for the new facility. The advertising budget? $40,000,000 (annual). The reason the advertising budget is such a high number and a recurring charge is that effective advertising returns an ROI on each dollar spent. If the software budget was increased 10X to $20 million, would the company get 10X as many customers? No. What about the facility? If you…

That misses the point though. Google and Meta have designed systems which capture nearly the entire surplus. In a non-monopolistic environment you'd expect somebody to be willing to step in at a bit less than Google's rates and offer the same outcomes.

They have all the control and no competition. The time for breaking these companies up or hamstringing them at least a little bit is many years past due.

The problem is that monopolies are extremely profitable and are as "American as apple pie," despite the prevailing healthy competition myth that goes alongside it.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#368

Post by orbabam » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 10:08 PM UTC

Kinda funny the author fed a visual from French film 'La Haine'[0] to ChatGPT to produce whatever this illustration is supposed to convey ("The world is our/ads"? What does that mean?).

Without crediting the movie of course.

[0] https://www.machina-deriveapprodi.com/post/le-monde-est-%C3%...

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#369

Post by johnnienaked » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 10:10 PM UTC

nfw2 wrote: post #140

bearjaws wrote: post #62

There is something to be said about the state of advertising. Increasingly it seems you must go to the almighty Google or Meta in order to launch any business. We're looking to expand into a new business line and have out grown our pharmacy capacity. The new business line will cost about $2M in software dev, and $3M for the new facility. The advertising budget? $40,000,000 (annual). We can build 10 robotic pharmacies…

In order to sell anything, people need to know about it. Google and Meta provide a way to make this possible. If they didn't exist, you wouldn't somehow have a more affordable way to get people to know about your product. However frustrating the current situation is, it is still more accessible than needing access to the airwaves or print media to try to sell anything new.

There is no competition in the ad space, so those companies can continue to just parasite their way to record earnings by stealing every other businesses profits. They create almost nothing of actual value, they are just heads of an ecosystem they totally control. Parasitism as a business model.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#370

Post by eudamoniac » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 10:17 PM UTC

johnnienaked wrote: post #366

Aurornis wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What big picture? Can you elaborate, or just snide drive-by criticisms? I mean I understand that a lot of people in this comment section wish ads didn’t exist and that everyone just automatically knew about relevant products and services without ads, but it all reads like utopian fantasy stuff.

Do you genuinely believe the economy didn't function prior to the invention of the advertisement?

Possibly? There have been advertisements for at least 2500 years. It's very likely that as long as there has been an economy as such, there have been business owners promoting themselves.