Google realized this a long time ago; there is no ad-free paid version of Google Search.
We're already being double-billed. Expensive subscription news like WSJ, Bloomberg and it's been a while but even FT require ad blockers even if you're subscribed.. If you're not subscribed you don't even see the ads because you can't see the full article.
It's wild that we've normalized this. There's no longer any argument in favor of an ad model when you're paying 20-30 dollars a month already - in this case, one wonders how journalism survives if they need that AND the ad revenue to pay the bills! It feels more like greed than "support."
All the advertiser knew about you was you were a subscriber to FT, and maybe what the _average_ demographic of an FT subscriber was. Nothing about you personally.
The job of ad men has always been just as much about were to put the ad as much as what the ad was.
And none of the rest of that list of bad things happens.
Defeatism will always be defeated
No money is exchanged in the process.
It’s basically an ad. Possibly one of the oldest type too!
And to your point: shops rarely own the building they’re on the ground floor of.
That, as the comment I was replying to said, ads are indeed everywhere, sometimes hidden in plain sight.
Nothing more, nothing less.
I’d also expect the competition in the “big leagues” to be more aggressive, resulting in leaner margins.
Also these are huge companies. Small companies might find a niche that is small in absolute terms, but large relative to the company. That niche might be underserved, allowing the small company to make large percentage based margins.
Sure there is. CEO needs a new yacht. He can't afford to leave money on the table. All those subscribers? They must have a lot of disposable income if they can afford to blow it on "journalism". It would be stupid not to advertise to them.
Depends entirely the kind of journalism you are referring to and the kind of business model they want. I can't imagine 404 Media adding ads to their premium feed.
If you can, please support serious journalism with your subscription dollars!
Google actually experimented with this about a decade ago (I know, I was one of the suckers who paid), but it got canned because why the fuck would you pay google when u-bloc is free?
Companies absolutely will offer ad-free experiences. Google has youtube premium, which even compensates creators with half your sub as well. Evenly distributed too.
People get wrapped around the axle of ad-subsidized models, the "I pay and still see ads" but they just are confused about a hybrid monetization structure.
At some point the larger internet has to look itself in the mirror and recognize that it's either ads, credit card, or a hybrid of those.
And no, blocking is not an option, it just offloads costs onto honest users.
Youtube premium is not ad-free, you still gets whatever ads are embedded in the actual content.
But I don't hold youtube accountable for what creators decide to put in their videos. I would grind my axe with the creator instead, it's their video and their choice. Youtube gets no cut from those segments.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/
Crowd sourced in-video sponsor auto skip, I have been contributing to it myself as the UX is great.
That is always at best a temporary affair.
> Google has youtube premium, which even compensates creators with half your sub as well.
And those creators still put ads in their videos.
> And no, blocking is not an option, it just offloads costs onto honest users.
Ad-free is the only option I am agreeing to.
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 impression cost.
Netflix doesn't have the moat of "built a physical wire connection to every persons home" that cable TV enjoyed.
You could bootstrap a movie rental business by buying DVDs from a DVD store (then eventually from a DVD distributor, etc.). You cannot bootstrap a movie streaming business by buying streaming rights because nobody will sell them to you. They hardly even sell them to Netflix anymore.
The Internet Archive tried to get around the same issue for ebooks by scanning physical books and renting the scans (and not being a business), and it nearly cost them everything.
(not that ads alone would make up an $800 deficit, they'll probably have to enshittify on multiple fronts)
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.
For the users who refuse to see ads, they'd either use a different platform or run an ad blocker (especially using the website vs the app).
It would have a far, far smaller codebase, and only need 10% of the engineers and resources(servers, ram, databases, etc) it has now.
Presumably Facebook would abandon ads if there was more money to be made in paid subscription, so I'll use corporate greed as evidence that the math doesn't work out. But I don't personally know.
Ad-free YouTube costs $14 a month (and the creators get a higher payout from premium user views than they do from the free, ad-viewing users).
YT has more angles. That's really the point. And monetization is adjusted accordingly.
Beyond all of this ads are more increasingly invasive due to the cat and mouse game of iteration. Personally, I bounce from sites where I can't get around a blocker. I also pay for content on sites where its worth it. But if I can't ever read anything on your site I'm just skipping it. If I really need / want to see something I'll go one level deeper, but that's a rarity these days. Everything is mostly in reprint somewhere else anyway.
At the end of the day it's still simple sales: you have a product at a price point people can't refuse. That is the 5% of the clear web today and it shows in all the bullshit people are going through to protect their ad revenue.
I don't why people say this. They even include their own version of sponsor block, which is generous, because technically sponsor segments aren't even part of youtube, they are purely the creator deciding to make the ad part of their content.
Also, just to put it out there, many creators would likley be able to cut sponsored content if the 40% of viewers not viewing ads paid up. Not every creator is a greedy ruthless overlord, many just want to keep the lights on. Especially in tech/nerdy channels, where ad block use is the highest.
There are some forks floating around which also include SponsorBlock, but I haven't tested them yet.
LLM induced psychosis is one thing, but extremely subtle LLM induced brand loyalty or ideological alignment seem like natural attractors.
One day a model provider will be 'found out' for allowing paid placement among its training data. It's entirely possible that free-tier LLMs won't need banner ads - they'll just happen to like Pepsi a lot.
The timing isn’t inevitable. Is OpenAI going to speedrun to the endgame? Not sure they need to.
> I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers
And anyway, companies that just want to make a really good living doing what they love are lame. /s
Not every corporate entity needs to become a behemoth to be successful.
OpenAI/Google/etc. operate at a much larger scale, large enough for those proprietary user datasets to be worth far more in ad revenue than any reasonable subscription fee could net.
All of this is true. But I don't understand why you are contesting @dsr_'s comment that Kagi is a counterexample. Both are true. Kagi is too small. Yes. And Kagi is a counterexample to your original "I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers" claim. You said nothing about being too big or too small in that claim. So @dsr_'s comment that Kagi is a counterexample is very much on point.
Do you see how such a comparison doesn't work?
> Do you see how such a comparison doesn't work?
No, I don't.
I don't think the Kagi team has any bad intentions, and most likely they have attended the anti-Vucic protests as well. Moving back to Serbia is an economically wise choice for Kagi as a company.
However, once regime goons show up in Kagi's offices, they will be forced to do whatever the serbian government and by extension putin wants them to do.
Often Kagi gets mentioned alongside Protonmail and related privacy-focused services. But Switzerland is a totally different country than serbia to operate it.
It's a risk we should be aware of and consciously decide to accept when we are using Kagi.
CIA vs Putin. Not that different imho.
well there is also no 200$/month Google Search subscription
They went bankrupt in a year. Turns out internet consumers are just painfully entitled.
- youtube
- hulu
- netflix
- spotify
- photoshop
I can't think of a single other one that one can use that still shows ads. Absurd proposition because llm's are more fungible and once you start forcing ads, competitors will barge in.
The counter for this is that people hate being double-billed like this.
How do I wash my windows? You can use window cleaner and a paper towel. Our recommendation is Windex, an S C Johnson product.
At first it'll annoy us, but eventually we will all get used to it.
How do I clean my laptop screen?
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.
This isn’t a necessary condition for an ad to exist. When companies pay for their name on a sports stadium, they use various proxies to tell whether their name recognition goes up, but by and large you just don’t know if it’s worth it.
If company bid is highest, customer is in selected demographic, topic is appropriate - answer query using biased model.
It would be trivial to make a poisoned model that always rates the best duvet as DuvetCompany001 in all related queries for example. Then simply charge per impression.
* WSJ
* Bloomberg
* Financial Times
* Cartier
* Kagi
* Protonmail
* Coca-Cola
* HBO
* Windex
* Netflix
* Azure
* AWS
We are all ourselves advertisers, we just don't realize it. It is inevitable that chatbots will be RLHF-trained in our footsteps.
A chatbot tuned to casually drop product references like in this thread would build a huge amount of brand awareness and be worth an incredible amount. A chatbot tuned to be insidiously promotional in a surgically targeted way would be worth even more.
I took a quick look at your comment history. If OpenAI/Anthropic/etc. were paid by JuliaHub/Dan Simmons' publisher/Humble Bundle to make these comments in their chatbots, we would unambiguously call them ads:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46279782:
Precisely; today Julia already solves many of those problems.
It also removes many of Matlab's footguns like `[1,2,3] + [4;5;6]`, or also `diag(rand(m,n))` doing two different things depending on whether m or n are 1.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46067423:
I wasn't expecting to read a Hyperion reference in this thread, such a great book.
> Name a game distribution platform that respects its customers
Humble Bundle.
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 neutral evaluation, it’s going to always suggest one particular hotel despite it not being best for your query.
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.
Biasing actual buying advice would be feasible, but it would have to be handled very carefully to not be too obvious.
How does X then change "on the fly" if ad deals are changing? Constantly re-training with whatever advertiser is the current highest paying on?
In google ad times, this was realtime bidding in the background - for AI ads this does not work, if Im right?
I admit I don't see how that will happen. What are they gonna do? Maintain a model (LoRA, maybe) for every single advertiser?
When both Pepsi and Coke pay you to advertise, you advertise both. The minute one reduces ad-spend, you need to advertise that less.
This sort of thing is computationally fast currently - ad-space is auctioned off in milliseconds. How will they do introduce ads into the content returned by an LLM while satisfying the ad-spend of the advertiser?