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Comment by disgruntledphd2 | Hacker News Reader

> It also estimates that LLM companies will capture 2% of the digital advertising market, which seems kind of low to me. There will be challenges in capturing it and challenges with user trust, but it seems super promising because it will likely be harder to block and has a lot of intent context that should make it like search advertising++. And for context, search advertising is 40% of digital ad revenue.

Yeah, I don't like that estimate. It's either way too low, or much too high. Like, I've seen no sign of OpenAI building an ads team or product, which they'd need to do soon if it's going to contribute meaningful revenue by 2030.

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https://openai.com/careers/growth-paid-marketing-platform-en...

Is that role not exactly what you mention?

Actually yes (I did mean to check again but I hadn't seen evidence of this before).

I do think that this seems odd, looks like they're hiring an IC to build some of this stuff, which seems odd as I would have expected them to be hiring multiple teams.

That being said, the earliest they could start making decent money from this is 2028, and if we don't see them hire a real sales team by next March then it's more likely to be 2030 or so.

At least the description is not at all about building an adtech platform inside OpenAI, it's about optimizing their marketing spend (which being a big brand, makes sense).

There are a bunch of people from FB at OpenAI, so they could staff an adtech team internally I think, but I also think they might not be looking at ads yet, with having "higher" ambitions (at least not the typical ads machine ala FB/Google). Also if they really needed to monetize, I bet they could wire up Meta ads platform to buy on ChatGPT, saving themselves a decade of building a solid buying platform for marketers.

> There are a bunch of people from FB at OpenAI, so they could staff an adtech team internally I think

Well they have Fidji, so she could definitely recruit enough people to make it work.

> with having "higher" ambitions (at least not the typical ads machine ala FB/Google)

Everyone has higher ambitions till the bills come due. Instagram was once going to only have thoughtfully artisan brand content and now it's just DR (like every other place on the Internet).

> At least the description is not at all about building an adtech platform inside OpenAI, it's about optimizing their marketing spend (which being a big brand, makes sense).

The job description has both, suggesting that they're hedging their bets. They want someone to build attribution systems which is both wildly, wildly ambitious and not necessary unless they want to sell ads.

> I bet they could wire up Meta ads platform to buy on ChatGPT, saving themselves a decade of building a solid buying platform for marketers.

Wouldn't work. The Meta ads system is so tuned for feed based ranking that I suspect they wouldn't gain much from this approach.

> it’s not at all about building an affect platform inside OpenAI.

Directly from posting: “building the technical infrastructure behind OpenAI’s paid marketing platform”

That's a marketing role, not a product role.

no. this role is for running ads campaigns at scale (on google, meta, etc) to grow openai users. its at a large enough scale it's called "platform" but it would be internal use only.

> Your role will include projects such as developing campaign management tools, integrating with major ad platforms, building real-time attribution and reporting pipelines, and enabling experimentation frameworks to optimize our objectives.

> Like, I've seen no sign of OpenAI building an ads team or product

You just haven't been paying attention. They hired Fidji Simo to lead applications in may, she led monetization/ads at facebook for a decade and have been staffing up aggressively with pros.

Reading between the lines in interview with wired last week[0], they're about to go all in with ads across the board, not just the free version. Start with free, expand everywhere. The monetization opportunities in chatgpt are going to make what google offers with adwords look quaint, and every CMO/performance marketer is going to go in head first. 2% is tiny IMO.

[0] - https://archive.is/n4DxY

I have indeed being paying attention, thanks. One executive does not an ads product make, though.

I think that ads are definitely a plausible way to make money, but it's legally required that they be clearly marked as such, and inline ads in the responses are at least 1-2 versions away.

The other option is either top ads or bottom ads. It's not clear to me if this will actually work (the precedents in messaging apps are not encouraging) but LLM chat boxes may be perceived differently.

And just because you have a good ad product doesn't mean you'll get loads of budget. You also need targeting options, brand safety, attribution and a massive sales team. It's a lot of work and I still maintain it will take till 2030 at least.

https://chatgpt.com/merchants/

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