Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy • Hacker News Board

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#81

Post by jsheard » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 3:32 PM UTC

Quarrelsome wrote: post #48

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…

> 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. but they're already paying you. While I appreciate the greed can be there, surely they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. There's many people who would pay who find advertising toxic and they have such huge volumes at free level that they'd be able to make a lot off a low i…

Paying users aren't necessarily profitable users though. It's harder to pin down with OpenAI, but I see no end of Claude users talking about how they're consistently burning the equivalent of >$1000 in API credits every month on the $200 subscription.

(not that ads alone would make up an $800 deficit, they'll probably have to enshittify on multiple fronts)

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#82

Post by Quarrelsome » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 3:32 PM UTC

barbazoo wrote: post #68

Quarrelsome wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, especi…

I’m assuming they have much more control during training and at runtime than us with our prompts. They’ll bake in whatever the person with the checkbook says to.

if they want dynamic pricing like adwords then its going to be a little challenging. While I appreciate its probably viable and they employ very clever people there's nothing like doing two things that are basically diametrically opposed at the same time. The LLM wants to give you what _should_ be the answer, but the winner of the ad word wants something else. There's a conflict there that I'd imagine might be quite challenging to debug.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#83

Post by likium » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 3:32 PM UTC

KellyCriterion wrote: post #29

nneonneo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have no guarantee the API models won’t be tampered with to serve ads. I suspect ads (particularly on those models) will eventually be “native”: the models themselves will be subtly biased to promote advertisers’ interests, in a way that might be hard to distinguish from a genuinely helpful reply.

you mean the API response then will contain the Ad display code?

Companies will pay OpenAI to prioritize more of their content during training. The weights for the product category will now be nudged more towards your product. Gartner Magic Quadrant for all businesses!

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#84

Post by Quarrelsome » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 3:33 PM UTC

jsheard wrote: post #81

Quarrelsome wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. but they're already paying you. While I appreciate the greed can be there, surely they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. There's many people who would pay who find advertising toxic and they have such huge volumes at free level that they'd be able to make a lot off a low i…

Paying users aren't necessarily profitable users though. It's harder to pin down with OpenAI, but I see no end of Claude users talking about how they're consistently burning the equivalent of >$1000 in API credits every month on the $200 subscription. (not that ads alone would make up an $800 deficit, they'll probably have to enshittify on multiple fronts)

wouldn't you charge those people more before you start serving ads? Also wont a lot of those sorts of users be running ad block anyway? I'm mildly sus that this is the right way to go.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#85

Post by clifdweller » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 3:33 PM UTC

KellyCriterion wrote: post #29

nneonneo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have no guarantee the API models won’t be tampered with to serve ads. I suspect ads (particularly on those models) will eventually be “native”: the models themselves will be subtly biased to promote advertisers’ interests, in a way that might be hard to distinguish from a genuinely helpful reply.

you mean the API response then will contain the Ad display code?

More akin to something like the twitter verified program where companies can bid for relevance in the training set to buy a greater weight so the model will be trained to prefer them. Would be especially applicable for software if azure and aws start bidding on whose platform it should recommend. Or something like when Convex just came out to compete with depth of supabase/firebase training in current model they could be offered to retrain the model giving a higher weight to their personally selected code bases given extra weight for a mere $Xb.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#86

Post by pseudalopex » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 3:34 PM UTC

GaryBluto wrote: post #70

nickphx wrote: post #37

[flagged]

Who are you to say LLMs have never provided value to the user? I last used an agent earlier today and it finished a job that would've taken me a lot longer to complete without assistance.

Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#87

Post by Quarrelsome » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 3:34 PM UTC

likium wrote: post #77

Quarrelsome wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. but they're already paying you. While I appreciate the greed can be there, surely they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. There's many people who would pay who find advertising toxic and they have such huge volumes at free level that they'd be able to make a lot off a low i…

Go plans at $8 are getting ads too. Netflix introduced a paid plan with ads, and it is more profitable.

sure but if Netflix keeps up its transition to cable then more people will return to the high seas.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#88

Post by WD-42 » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 3:34 PM UTC

Quarrelsome wrote: post #48

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…

> 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. but they're already paying you. While I appreciate the greed can be there, surely they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. There's many people who would pay who find advertising toxic and they have such huge volumes at free level that they'd be able to make a lot off a low i…

They aren’t shooting any feet if the competition is doing it too.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#89

Post by baby_souffle » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 3:34 PM UTC

techblueberry wrote: post #54

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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….”

> I’m going to notice “Susie, while at home drinking her delicious ice cold coca-cola….”

It will be much more subtle. Asking an LLM to help you sift through reviews before you spend $250 on some appliance or what good options are for hotels on your next trip…

Basically the same queries people throw into google but then have to manually open a bunch of tabs and do their own comparison except now the llm isn’t doing a neutral evaluation, it’s going to always suggest one particular hotel despite it not being best for your query.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#90

Post by techblueberry » Sun, Jan 18, 2026, 3:34 PM UTC

woeirua wrote: post #79

techblueberry wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Have you tried the new models, bro?”

I’m convinced that there will be people declaring that this isn’t AGI all the way up to the moment that they become permanently unemployed.

GPT-4 was AGI.