Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

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By doing well, you mean they’ve reached a user base that is 0.00001% the size of Google (feel free to “actually…” me with the correct number of zeroes).

If we want the productivity unlock of search (and AI) to be accessible to the entire world and not just to niche internet nerds who live and work online all day, we probably are going to get ads again. I’m sorry that this is true and has always been true. OpenAI is just a few years from admitting this themselves.

Even if they reach 100 million paid users at $20/m, it’s not enough to stay competitive given competition will offer a free product that shows ads to monetize the other 5 billion AI users on earth in addition to a pro subscription tier and will always have the superior model.

Not all humans are the same as you and care about the same stuff enough to pay for it, I know, it’s upsetting. But this is reality. And its better for the world. It helps the most people in a sustainable way.

> By doing well, you mean they’ve reached a user base that is 0.00001% the size of Google (feel free to “actually…” me with the correct number of zeroes).

I will! (Kagi CEO here, and Happy New Year!)

It is closer to 0.01%, comparing the number of daily queries which is my favorite metric. Other way to put it is that Kagi is currently ~7 seconds of Google's daily search volume.

You may say it is a small number, but each one of Kagi's searches is paid and deliberate - and I dare say - a vote for the better web.

Great way to measure it actually - I suspect users of Kagi have a much higher average search volume than the average Google user. I know I definitely do.

Currently I think the only piece of clothing I own that has an actual logo on it is my Kagi T-shirt (for being an early subscriber) - you could say I am a fan :-D

I don’t think ads fundamentally help people.

Except they do. They help connect buyers with needs/wants to sellers with solutions.

I know this breaks HNs brain so I don't expect to win this one however.

Can ads encourage people to buy stuff they don't need? Yes. Like most things (including humans), they aren't perfectly rational.

> They help connect buyers with needs/wants to sellers with solutions.

You know what else does this but in a non-creepy, non-tracking way that doesn't try to artificially create needs/wants in people? Accurate search results.

If I want something I can search for it and find it. SEO and advertising and sponsored results are the way companies try to skew search results (usually by making them less accurate and useful for the person searching) in a way that benefits them.

The problem is the best way to weight the accuracy of results (as you say, SEO exists) is with skin in the game.

A bidding-based advertising system ultimately results in the most valuable solution winning, since the ad spend will be marginally bid up as close to the value the consumer is willing to pay for the product/service minus producer input costs.

The most successful companies ultimately have the most to spend on ads. Again, this does not result in perfectly rational outcomes all the time (because humans are irrational), but comes damn close.

Now, whether we should let one company take the profits off of that ad bidding system (since it inherently trends to monopoly) is another question.

An auction system for ads results in the most profitable solution winning, not the most valuable. Marginally bidding toward the largest difference between consumer price and input cost is a bad thing; that's the least efficient solution, and means you are maximally overpaying for value received. An ideal search would find products with the smallest difference between price and input cost, i.e. items near the Pareto frontier.

For a more distilled scenario, if you manually accepted open stock trade offers, and your broker took kickbacks to always show you the worst bids/asks that they think you might fall for and make it difficult to find the best quotes, that would obviously be bad. In fact not providing best execution is illegal. The ad economy runs on exactly this conflict of interest. Money flowing through ads represents inflated transaction costs.

If you genuinely believe that then I’m delighted for you. You are living in paradise

I gladly affirm that in principle it is possible for advertisements to be beneficial on net by informing people with needs about how suitable products meet those needs.

Now turn off your ad-blocker, look at the next ten ads you see on the internet, and count how many of them fall into that category.

They are just helping you redefine 'need'. Obviously.

I agree except when it is overwhelming. ads are so prevalent these days that many brains (mine included) look at every ad as a scam

It just depends where you consume media. I've never felt so unreachable (via ads) online in 25 years of using the internet for play and work.

It just depends where you consume media.

hmmmm I am not sure what you mean here? wherever I consume the media I will be bombarded with ads (regardless of my blocking skills...) :)

Ads can be a matter of quality and relevance, just like search. I'm happy to read ads relevant to my interests in an appropriate context.

Unfortunately, this is a clear clash of "line goes up" versus "corporate integrity".

In the print media days, there was somewhat of a code of conduct-- publishers generally didn't want to run outright fraudulent or misleading ads because it damaged the image of the publication itself.

I'm not sure that Google has proven itself capable of rising to the same standards.

>It helps the most people in a sustainable way.

Without taking this too seriously, define "sustainable." The free, ad-supported model is what has given us the social media companies, which has contributed hugely to making the global order look less sustainable than ever.

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