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Comment by HarHarVeryFunny | Hacker News Reader

I guess a couple of reasons:

1) Because it is disruptive. Things may get shook up, and Google may not end up in as exclusive position as they are currently in. There's risk.

2) Because it's not obvious how advertising would fit in with a conversational interface. Google may stay as #1 search/answer engine, but would revenue be adversely affected?

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I think it could fit in with a conversational chat bot the same way that ads are part of podcasts and YouTube channels: a conversational and explicit ad that helps pay for the otherwise freely available content.

Full disclosure: I work at Google, but nowhere near the chatbot stuff. This is my humble opinion and nothing more.

The problem with this is that it pretty explicitly makes the chatbot a worse product. The beauty of google ads is that they don't degrade the service. If they're not interesting just scroll right past. I don't think people would use the adbot service if Bing is providing a competitor that only has banner ads or maybe a clearly marked ad link. Bing wins because they go from making no money on search to some, but if google copies the strategy their market size is destroyed.

ChatGPT and the like are the automated tools to seamlessly introduce advertising into text/image content - with the right prompt all the advertisements are between the lines. All it needs at the end is: this paragraph includes content sponsored by [Comapny name].

Edit: Why have ads separable from content if you can just weave them in? Ad-blocking is toast, you'll have to use another AI service to fish them out and resummarize.

Maybe we can fast-forward past this projected future where our computer overlords are just trying to sell us stuff, and get to the bit where we are insignificant ants they mostly ignore. Sounds better, really.

Banner, sidebar, in-line, interstitial, modal… what advertising modes wouldn’t work on conversational interface?

Conversational interfaces seem ideally suited to voice assistants. When you ask "hey google, what's the default password for my router?" does it make you sit through a 30 second ad before saying "the default password is password".

That sounds like a complete nightmare. At least in a web page I can at least look away from the ad.

It may be worse than that if this Sony patent is any guide... https://www.techradar.com/news/sony-patent-would-have-you-ye...

Amazon Alexa does yell ads like that. It's horrific.

Yes, plus it could introduce of new forms of advertising in the conversation itself. Algorithmic product placement. It could get weird.

If ChatGPT tells me it's enjoying a refreshing Coke, I'm not buying it ! :)

Welp, statistics say otherwise :-)

Well, those are ways you could try to do it, but whether they would "work" (attract click-thrus, not alienate users) is another question.

None of those would work with a chatGPT like search platform. Search ads work because they're largely indistinguishable from the organic content. You search google and get a million links, the first few are ads. The entire model of chatbots is completely different. So the only truly effective way to advertise on a chatbot is to make the response itself into the ad. But would people use such a service, or would they move to another one that just uses banner ads which monetize at much lower rates? If chatbots completely replace the current search ecosystem Google will be forced to either lose huge market share or make much less money per search.

I'd argue that it it give Google even more capacity. Just one more place to advertise.

I'd say your answer is an "advertisement" for ChatGPT. The parent AND the grandparent didn't mention OpenAI. This is how you could advertise in answers.

> Search ads work because they're largely indistinguishable from the organic content.

I'm not sure this is true. Surely they are more lucrative when they are indistinguishable, but for a lot of Google's history they were very noticeably different, a fact Google even prided itself on, and bragged about. Seems like it was growth requirements that changed that, not whether the ads were originally lucrative when people could tell they were ads.

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