OpenAI to test ads in ChatGPT as it burns through billions | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI to test ads in ChatGPT as it burns through billions

arstechnica.com

81 pointsTerretta87 comments

Previously (yesterday):

Our approach to advertising - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649577 - Jan 2026 (227 comments)

If ads are clearly labeled as "ad" or "sponsored", and they only appear for free users, I think seeing ads is a pretty reasonable price to pay for those who want to use the service for free.

If they're not labeled, or are shown even to paying users, I think that's a problem.

The article says they will be clearly labeled and only for free accounts

They will also appear to users paying $8/month, not just free.

Sounds like the “pay enough to get better models but not remove ads” tier, kind of like the basic Netflix plan.

And if you ask chatgpt about major sponsors, a few years from now, it’ll honestly answer, even if that means badmouthing them, etc.

Also, everyone gets a free pony.

Sometimes it's a fallacy, but sometimes the slope really is slippery (see: cable TV, Netflix, etc)

All ads start as clearly labeled and distinctive. Then via the magic of iteration and A/B testing they magically evolve to become visually indistinguishable from the rest of the content except for what’s required by law.

You don’t say

https://9to5mac.com/2026/01/16/iphone-apple-app-store-search...

The iron law of encrapification: if a company can make more money by downgrading the user experience, it will. I imagine within Apple there were still people who advocated for a better, more transparent user experience, but ultimately they seem to have lost out to services people who just want to grab more money.

It's unfortunate because user experience was a core differentiating advantage for Apple that got them to where they are now.

IMO that's unavoidable when you're a public company beholden to shareholders who only care about short term stock prices.

OK, maybe not all shareholders are playing the short game, but I feel like a lot of them are.

I miss Tim Apple saying that there were things (accessibility) that Apple did that weren't based on ROI, and people who disagreed should get out of the stock.

> I miss Tim Apple saying that there were things (accessibility) that Apple did that weren't based on ROI, and people who disagreed should get out of the stock.

That sounds like a great way to get booted out of the CEO position.

Apparently not at Apple, since he said that in 2014.

They seem to have done OK since then.

I don't understand, Apple users did get a more "transparent" experience /s

Hahaha. On an unrelated note I immediately turned off Liquid Glass.

They'll eventually want to set it up so you read the sponsored content first, before seeing the tag saying it's an ad. You're more likely to absorb it then.

Especially if it's LLM-generated to fit with the context, the message will slip right into the mind. Then a little "(Sponsored)" at the bottom after you've already consumed the ad.

This is a bit like how ads are presented on X, they look like regular posts or replies but they usually feel off topic and you're thinking "huh, this doesn't fit the discussion". But LLMs will allow much more seamless and sneaky ads.

And of course they will start collecting more information about users, and build an entire intelligent data extraction system around it.

Come now, don't be evil!

I agree but I fear it won't stay that way. They boil us frogs slowly.

Maybe at the beginning ... but with time? who knows ...

Btw, the end game is probably having ads in the llm context .... or directly in the llm training set.

Ads will lower the quality of the training data, an RAG is more likely. Pay to get your product's INSTALLME.md ranked under some specific semantic vectors.

>only appear for free users

Why would advertisers prefer people without money to people with money?

The question is flawed.

People who do not pay for ChatGPT often have money and prefer not to pay for for a subscription for several reasons including, but not exclusively: 1) They don't use ChatGPT often enough to justify it 2) They use alternatives primarily (a subset of #1) 3) They choose to spend their money on other things

How can an advertiser tell the difference? Which is a stronger signal of having money: paying for something, or not paying for something? Furthermore, with all those reasons, why would advertisers prefer those people in ChatGPT? Advertisers are trying to change your behavior, usually to spend money the way they want you to. If you’re rarely using the service and don’t easily part with money, you’re probably less worth persuing than… well the person who is the opposite of those things.

Plenty of free users have lots of money. Not wanting to pay for something != not being able to pay for something.

But being willing to pay for something is a pretty good indicator for being willing to pay for other things too.

Advertisers are salivating at paying users but paying users really don't want any advertising in their product because they're paying not to have any advertising. That does not mean somebody will not cave in and shove advertising in regardless.

Create paid tiers WITH ads and premium paid tiers without add … this is the trend in streaming services

Yikes, I think we'll need to go local.

Every other iteration of a service that introduces a free ad-paid tier then ratchets it to bifurcation of premium in to 'premium' and 'premium with no ads' and then on and on.

My bet is that there will be ads for both groups. The paid group is arguably more valuable from an advertiser’s standpoint, and you can target heavy users with more granularity.

Just like Google at the beginning

They already confirmed it’ll also appear in the (lowest) paid tier.

I’d rather they served ads. The economy is somewhat broken right now, with the way these things are bypassing all regular information channels. This will hopefully create lots and lots of new business for 3rd parties again.

Ideally, they’ll introduce a whole new level of targeting relevance, which will be good for both advertisers and prospects.

these ads don't solve the broken economy. The original creators of some content that was stolen by OpenAI will not get a piece of the ad pie.

we’re talking about different things. there’s meritocratic fairness where producers are paid fairly for their work, and there’s a functioning economy, where there are simply enough economic opportunities to sustain established norms of commercial participation by the broad population.

Thinking about the power and reach of political ads served by social media companies over the past 10 years, this is gonna be a whole nother bucket of worms.

When you don't know how to monetize your service, you add ads.

From a very entertaining Matt Levine article (https://archive.is/8QYxl)

> In a science fiction story, if you invented a superintelligent robot and asked it how to make money, it might come up with cool never-before-seen ideas, or at least massive fun market manipulation. But in real life, if you train a large language model on the internet and ask it how to make money, it will say “advertising, affiliate shopping links and porn.” That’s the lesson the internet teaches!

But I think it makes a lot of sense for very popular consumer products. In my honest opinion, I much prefer having services like Google, Youtube, Gmail, Maps, ChatGPT etc exist for free, but with ads, rather than not exist at all. Preferably with an option to pay and remove ads

Nowadays I'm happy to pay for Youtube premium or LLM, but back during my student days I could not really afford it - and I'm glad there was a free tier (with ads)

>In my honest opinion, I much prefer having services like Google, Youtube, Gmail, Maps, ChatGPT

I don't use any of these except YouTube (if only I could find the content elsewhere…) and I still pay for them when I purchase anything advertised on these properties because, of course, the companies advertising on Google makes all their customers pay for the free (lol) services. All advertising expenses are included in the price of the products, even if you never saw any ads.

We could easily charge for each of these services and still have them. Advertising is not necessary at all. It's just a way to make others pay for your services. It's a free riding problem to externalize costs on those who don't partake in the scheme.

Pay your share and don't call free what others will subsidize. Unless if a public service and we collectively agree on the split (vote and taxes, which we can debate publicly)

Right. But a good portion of the world can't afford the premium and having access to these services is still valuable. For every broke student or someone from a poor background, who probably don't make any money for the company (due to not buying advertised stuff), there's someone from a well off background, who will more than subsidize it by virtue of clicking on a lawyer ad (or whatever)

Nowadays I'm happy to pay, but that wasn't always the case. And I personally think that having an ad tier and fee tier is fine. Serves everyone

I much prefer to subsidize my neighborhood / friends / colleagues / family / … than have the world sink in ads. That enshites everything. It turns all social media into hate machines. And the cost is only externalized and it is definitely not reduced by polluting the mind with all the ads (same as climate change where we're only making the situation worse by procrastinating). The free part and the fake generosity are an illusion.

Freemium is the way if you're ok with paying forward. Not admium.

The online media I support as subscribers don't display any ad. And it's fine. I don't pay for the content, I pay for journalism.

I’ve thought if they ban car commercials and truck ads, the price would go down. How much is an open question? Would they actually want to drop the cost?

Or you end up with one of the greatest business models of all time like Google?

I struggle to understand people getting butt hurt about a free service showing its users adverts, that will keep the service free.

They should have done this earlier, so their adds would be better by now, and they have a better chance against Google.

Google is/was in a somewhat special situation that they could show you ads that were relevant to what you are looking for. In 95% of the websites I visit this is simply not true.

As usual just because Google uses it and seems to be successful with it doesn't mean that it will work for normal companies as well.

ChatGPT in theory has the potential to show relevant ads as there service involves the user stating what they want. So they could actually present relevant ads. We'll have to see how it turns out.

It wasn't that long ago I got down voted on HN for saying this was going to happen.

As a general rule of thumb in sites like Reddit and HN - the quality of votes is significantly lower than the quality of comments. This is because it takes much more effort to comment, so there is a selection bias.

I'm not convinced that downvotes add much value. They should be a "this is irrelevant/spam" button but in practice they seem to be used as a "dislike" button to enforce groupthink.

Slashdot moderation and something going by having people tag comments as Insightful, Interesting, Offtopic or flamebait. It assigned positive or negative points based on that.

The two problems were the horrible UI and that at some points evaluators used te negative tags just to punish views they didn't agree with.

But maybe an AI evaluator would be less biased?

Voting can be for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes I downvote things like that because I want to bury bait that would send an argument into a well-trodden and boring direction.

Let the reader decide? I - incredibly rarely - downvote. It's either vote up, or move along.

You're strategy is good. I'm a bit jaded. I try to make up for it with upvotes and clarifying comments... Seems like I often run into people arguing over a misunderstanding.

"You are strategy is good." And I missed the edit window, oof.

Yeah… I don’t understand how anyone could look at the prevalence of advertising and affiliate links on the internet and believe they would for some reason stay away from the LLM products.

Sure Sam Altman and his $200/mo subscribers won’t see them, but it was clear they were coming for free users.

>$200/mo subscribers won’t see them

Yet. Amazon Prime has ads despite it being a paid service.

It’s disturbing just how much more insidious ads could be through a chat bot

I'll be interested to see how long the ads remain blockable, if at all, by adblockers (on the web UI, at least).

Or to put it another way, I'll be interested to see how long before the ads become inseparable from the actual content of the response.

This comment brought to you by Carls Jr

Brawno, it's got what plants crave.

"I’ll get back to your question in a second, but before that a word from our sponsors…"

I wonder if using a local llm to override the ads would work. A finetuned one for removing ads will probably appear soon

How will you know your response doesn't contain an ad?

I see it as the responses eventually mimicking all of the marketing spam posts, where company Y compares it's competitors poorly or does a thought leadership piece on how you can do X by hand or have their product do X for you.

I’d be curious what proportion of their usage is on the mobile app and doesn’t need to worry about a significant number of users having adblockers. My instinct would be probably a decent majority is mobile, but not as high as something like Facebook, but that’s just a guess.

I have made some purchasing decisions on expensive products based on analysis ChatGPT has done for me, if they can capitalize on that, it could be a decent way to make some money, as long as they remain unbiased and basically just function as an affiliate marketer. Sometimes I do want to be sold on something.

What is the point for a company to pay OpenAI for products that it would recommend anyway? Companies are going to pay only if they can add bias to the results otherwise there is no point.

Many of the advertising targets (you) will have confessed or indirectly revealed many of their aspirations, interests, hobbies, health, life and relationship problems and preferences in “chat”

In a way they can’t get due to increased use of ad blockers or tightening restrictions on data brokers (California and EU GPDR) etc.

So it’ll be very competitive for an advertiser to go with your ai “friend” who knows all about your hemmorhoids, booze and sex problems. All of which Google and Meta can infer or at least pin on you via guilt by association.

Meta screwed that one by breaking up known connections and communities and putting AI slop and promoted content front and center . They can infer less from who you know or interact with because they stopped caring about connecting you to real humans you actually know, years ago.

Banning all your friends and breaking up all those core groups for voting wrong or thinking wrong or whatever more closely suited their interests and agendas at the time.

It might know what I do for work or living based on what I ask for help with etc.

OpenAI is in a tough spot.

I just canceled my $200/month GPT-Pro subscription. 5.2-Pro is in decline -- it has been getting noticeably worse at a steady rate since introduction. At this point, it's not appreciably better for most queries than Claude 4.5 Opus, and Opus is roughly 10x faster.

Noticed the same. Also, I noticed the same with the prev version, immediately improved when switching to the new 5.2.

The smoking gun is the time. If I ask it a question that's subtle in "thinking" mode and it starts replying in a few seconds, the answer will probably be trash. I'm almost sure they degrade the models over time.

An interesting approach - start strong when everyone is running benchmarks, taper off through the life of the release, introduce new version that is no better than the last version but it magically seems much better by comparison to the degraded previous version. Rinse, repeat, grift.

My impression is that recently ChatGPT tries to avoid going out to research on the Internet as long as it can. I have to tell it to pull info from the web or verify its answers on the web explicitly.

Could it be that they are trying to save traffic?

My non-existent marketing instinct would tell me that they are trying to keep you inside the app to convince you that ChatGPT is the internet, the same way some people wouldn't know there's life outside Facebook.

My grumpy instinct tells me they know that they're poisoning the internet and they have given out on trying to weed out the fake websites from the real ones.

Or Opus 4.5 has gotten better since release? Can not point my finger at it but the code I get is most of the time super flawless.

In favor of what?

I downgraded to the $20 tier. I also have a $20/month subscription with Anthropic and another $20/month with Kimi. There was a time when $200/month for Pro made sense, but I don't think it's a good value right now.

Ads and erotica! The two best ways of monetizing life-changing tech and not puffed up hype!

AI is so life changing that nobody wants to pay for it.

Good thing I didn't develop an unnecessary dependency on this product, so now I don't have to suffer through its enshittification. It's almost like it was obvious this was going to happen years ago.

By the way don't sleep on this detail:

> The banner ads will appear in the coming weeks for logged-in users of the free version of ChatGPT *as well as the new $8 per month ChatGPT Go plan*

Even if you pay for the product, you're still the product. If we don't own our software, our software will own us.

In six months, we will hear about how OpenAI innovatively created an AI ad auction and marketplace that, effectively, enables companies to purchase ad space within the inference pipeline, complete with "anonymous" demographic targeting and all the advertising fun things that Google and Meta are frightened of.

Does anybody else think that OpenAI is lowering their output speed so you have to spend more time on the site?

At least they’re speed running their downfall.

That means they're in a bad shape because this was labeled a last resort by Sam himself in 2024.

Ad Generated Income

It's not about how it starts. It always starts small and measured, but once you open up to ads, you open up the pandora's box of enshittification paths.

Why is this news? I saw ads on ChatGPT months ago...

Ars now requires a user-agent header

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