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Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

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Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#51

Post by Quarrelsome »

KellyCriterion wrote: post #31
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #10

> Look on the bright side, if they're turning to ads it likely means AGI is not on the horizon. Your job is safe! I like this quote from TFA :)

I stumbled upon this one as well, but I do not understand it really: Why is my job safe if Ads prove there is no AGI? Because even if there would be AGI, they could (and would?) serve ads anyway?

who would pivot to selling ads if AGI was in reach? These orgs are burning a level of funding that is looking to fulfil dreams, ads is a pragmatic choice that implies a the moonshot isn't in range yet.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#52

Post by Teever »

dmd wrote: post #40
throwaway150 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but it is still a valid counterexample to: > I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers

It's really not, though. If a "valid counterexample" can be something with, say, one user, then I can make a "valid counterexample" to literally anything you choose, but that's meaningless.

Someone is showing that they can deliver similar products or services without ads. It’s comparable.

Not every corporate entity needs to become a behemoth to be successful.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#53

Post by bflesch »

dsr_ wrote: post #19
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #6

I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers, even the expensive paid ones. Ad revenue isn't uniformly distributed across users, but rather heavily skewed towards the wealthiest users, exactly the users most able to purchase an ad-free experience. The users paying $20 or $200/month for premium tiers of ChatGPT are precisely the ones you don't want to exclude from generating ad revenue. Google realized this a…

Counter example: Kagi.

Kagi has recently moved to new offices in Belgrade. While I like their product we should not forget that serbia is not a free country, there has been massive corruption and russian influence. Even though there are massive protests from time to time, no leadership change has happened.

I don't think the Kagi team has any bad intentions, and most likely they have attended the anti-Vucic protests as well. Moving back to Serbia is an economically wise choice for Kagi as a company.

However, once regime goons show up in Kagi's offices, they will be forced to do whatever the serbian government and by extension putin wants them to do.

Often Kagi gets mentioned alongside Protonmail and related privacy-focused services. But Switzerland is a totally different country than serbia to operate it.

It's a risk we should be aware of and consciously decide to accept when we are using Kagi.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#54

Post by techblueberry »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #20
andy99 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There would be competition from API wrappers, if you want to pay there will always be lots of options to chat without ads. I hate to think what they and others might come up with to try and thwart this.

I think ads will take the form of insidious but convincing product placement invisibly woven into model outputs. This will both prevent any blocking of ad content, and also be much more effective: after all, we allude to companies and products all the time in regular human conversation, and the best form of marketing is organic word-of-mouth.

I don’t know how subtle or stealth you can be in text. In movies, there’s a lot of stuff going on, I may not particularly notice, I’m going to notice “Susie, while at home drinking her delicious ice cold coca-cola….”

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#55

Post by MontyCarloHall »

doubled112 wrote: post #39
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter-counterpoint: people pay exorbitant amounts of money for cable TV channels that still show ads. Even the premium channels (HBO et al.) implicitly show ads in the form of product placement, which incidentally is exactly how I think chatbots will show ads. Most users won't even consciously realize they're there.

Exactly. It'll provide you the how to when prompted, but also include product recommendations from paying companies. How do I wash my windows? You can use window cleaner and a paper towel. Our recommendation is Windex, an S C Johnson product. At first it'll annoy us, but eventually we will all get used to it.

I think it will be even more subtle than that.

  How do I clean my laptop screen?
Use a mix of distilled water and vinegar, and buff gently with a microfiber cloth. Avoid using cleaners like Windex, which is absolutely fantastic for glass but way too powerful for the delicate coatings on laptop screens.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#56

Post by techblueberry »

woeirua wrote: post #13

People are a bit too eager to jump on the emergence of ads as an indicator that things are slowing down. I view it as the opposite, mostly because of my experience with Codex 5.2 and Opus 4.5. These models are incredible. I think by some definitions they’re already AGI. So why bake in ads? My hunch is that raising funds privately can only take you so far. To keep scaling, they need more capital and have to go public.…

“Have you tried the new models, bro?”

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#57

Post by smikhanov »

mancerayder wrote: post #44
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #6

I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers, even the expensive paid ones. Ad revenue isn't uniformly distributed across users, but rather heavily skewed towards the wealthiest users, exactly the users most able to purchase an ad-free experience. The users paying $20 or $200/month for premium tiers of ChatGPT are precisely the ones you don't want to exclude from generating ad revenue. Google realized this a…

This kills me, and you're right - there's no escaping the ads even with a sub. Take online journalism as an example. We're already being double-billed. Expensive subscription news like WSJ, Bloomberg and it's been a while but even FT require ad blockers even if you're subscribed.. If you're not subscribed you don't even see the ads because you can't see the full article. It's wild that we've normalized this. There's…

To be honest, in the pre-internet era, paid paper copy of FT had ads too. The delivery mechanisms for ads in the internet era are trillion times nastier and more annoying, of course. By the standards of today’s web, the print ad for Cartier on the second page of paper FT looks almost classy, interesting to read.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#58

Post by Quarrelsome »

OptionOfT wrote: post #16

I remember when Netflix took out a whole page ad for their Orange is the new Black show. John Oliver had a piece on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc This is a natural extension of it. But what is revolutionary is the scale that this is now possible. We have so many people out there who now blindly trust the output of an LLM (how many colleagues have you had proudly telling you: I asked Claude and this i…

> slowly they'll become more part of the text

Wouldn't that be quite challenging in terms of engineering? Given these people have been chasing AGI it would be a considerable distraction to pivot into hacking into the guts of the output to dynamically push particular product. Furthermore it would degrade their product. Furthermore you could likely keep prodding the LLM to then diss the product being advertised, especially given many products advertised are not necessarily the best on the market (which is why the money is spent on marketing instead of R&D or process).

Even if you manage to successfully bodge the output, it creates the desire for traffic to migrate to less corrupted LLMs.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#59

Post by kristianc »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #6

I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers, even the expensive paid ones. Ad revenue isn't uniformly distributed across users, but rather heavily skewed towards the wealthiest users, exactly the users most able to purchase an ad-free experience. The users paying $20 or $200/month for premium tiers of ChatGPT are precisely the ones you don't want to exclude from generating ad revenue. Google realized this a…

No, there's GSuite / Google Workspace instead. OpenAI doesn't have one of those.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#60

Post by barbazoo »

KellyCriterion wrote: post #31
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #10

> Look on the bright side, if they're turning to ads it likely means AGI is not on the horizon. Your job is safe! I like this quote from TFA :)

I stumbled upon this one as well, but I do not understand it really: Why is my job safe if Ads prove there is no AGI? Because even if there would be AGI, they could (and would?) serve ads anyway?

If AGI was around the corner, they wouldn’t have to resort to what some consider a scummy way to make money. They’d would become the most valuable company on the planet, winning the whole game. Ads show you they don’t know what else to do but they desperately need money.
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