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Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

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Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#91

Post by Quarrelsome »

npongratz wrote: post #73
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…

The progression of the cable TV industry shows many people are more than happy, or apathetic enough, to allow the industry to double-dip.

basic people sure, but the early internet showed an extremely strong demand for a better service than cable TV. When that demand is there then people will start seeking other options and building bridges of convenience to help the basic people also port over.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#93

Post by techblueberry »

baby_souffle wrote: post #89
techblueberry wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right, I just don’t see how it can be subtle, maybe it will be the opposite where I assume things are ads that aren’t, but any time I see a specific brand or solution I will assume it’s an ad.

It’s not like a movie where I’m engrossed by the narrative or acting and only subliminally see the can of coke on the table (though even then)

Maybe image generation ads will be a bit more subtle.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#94

Post by Quarrelsome »

WD-42 wrote: post #88
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…

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

that's extreme motivation for someone to build a new competitor. Deepseek demonstrated that there's innovation out there to be had at a fraction of the effort.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#95

Post by fwlr »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #63
barbazoo wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This doesn’t answer the actual question: why they wouldn’t just do both?

There are costs to doing ads (e.g. it burns social/political capital that could be used to defuse scandals or slow down hostile legislation, it consumes some fraction of your employees’ work hours, it may discourage some new talent from joining).

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#96

Post by WD-42 »

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?

The llm output will just contain ads directly. It’s going to be super hard to tell them apart from normal output.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#97

Post by baby_souffle »

iamnothere wrote: post #76
philipwhiuk wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers, even the expensive paid ones. The counter for this is that people hate being double-billed like this.

The ads may not be announced. If ads can be subtly inserted “organically” through crafted weights then AI companies may try to claim that it isn’t advertising, if it’s even possible to catch them doing this. For instance, advertisers could pay to have their product embedded as the “best” in a category during training. If this is done as a fine-tuning step then it could be re-run later as advertisers and base models c…

How would the billing work for this? So much of advertising technology is tracking for the purposes of attribution.

How does openAI know what to charge for a particular product and category? How do I know if my money was well spent to boost my product in that category?

I don’t think you’re wrong! I’m just curious about how the new pricing models will work.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#98

Post by II2II »

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…

> but they're already paying you.

That's not how it works. It never has.

Even in the days of print publications, the publisher would seek revenues from advertisers, subscribers, and they would sell their subscriber data. (On top of that, many would have contests and special offers which probed for deeper data about the readership.) In some sense, the subscriber data was more shallow. In other senses, it was more valuable.

I get what you're saying about shooting themselves in the foot, and I'm sure there will be options for corporate clients that will treat the data collected confidentially while not displaying advertising. I also doubt that option will be available (in any official sense) to individuals much as it isn't available (in any official sense) to users of Windows. For the most part, people won't care. Those who would care are those who are sensitive enough about their privacy that they wouldn't use these services in the first place, or are wealthy enough to be sensitive about their privacy that they would could pay for services that would make real guarantees.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#99

Post by glouwbug »

reactordev wrote: post #4
mentos wrote: post #3

The pragmatic side of me wonders if there is any way to shape this inevitable future now so we might see a better outcome 20 years.

Unplug In all seriousness. Windows is invaded by copilot, OpenAI introducing ads, Google providing Siri for Apple, it’s all just a collusion to keep you buying. Disconnect. From TV, Media, Ads, Social Networks, Predatory subscriptions, all of it. The only way to show these companies that we are not on board with this is to not participate.

Reddit generates its revenue with schadenfreude, YouTube and AAA games with GenAI (see: Ghibli in Call of Duty, and fast growing AI channels like Nick Invests or Bernard with “Why it Sucks to be X”).

On my shelf from the corner of my eye I see “Understanding the Linux Kernel”. It’s outdated, but it comes from a time of peer review and subject matter experts. I don’t need to double guess if the author is hallucinating or if they’re subconsciously trying to sell me something.

Maybe it’s time we return to books for entertainment and knowledge share.

Re: Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

#100

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

mancerayder wrote: post #74
nathan_compton wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why we need to ban targeted advertising. In fact, I think ads should be 100% opt-in. The user has to accept them or it is illegal to show them to the user.

That's what a generic semi-forced opt in via JavaScript is for, as we learn from the cookie opt in nonsense of EU sites. It's compliance for compliance sake.

But what could an opt-in requirement for advertising possibly mean other than a compliance checkbox that 99% of users click through? It just seems like where you land if you start with the intuition that ad-supported platforms shouldn't be legal, realize that implementing that policy would ban all print media, and do your best to rescue it rather than abandon the idea as unworkable.
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