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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

The ads are for the free tier and new $8 ad-supported plan.

The revenue from a few ads on the free tier in exchange for limited queries to GPT-5.3 is negligible compared to what they pull in from API costs and the subscription plans. This looks like a play to justify the existence of the previously money-losing free tier as they go into an IPO. Throw some ads in there to make it closer to a neutral on the balance sheet.

The key part of that quote was "everybody in the world". The ads are their way of sustaining the low end of the access.

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The revenue from highly targeted ads, using even better profiles than Google Search or even Facebook could build, may be non-negligible.

Commercial ads could be a smaller revenue source than political ads.

Political ads would destroy the value proposition. That would be an incredibly short-sighted move.

Chats with LLMs are often intensely personal, you don't want to create the perception that politicians have any level of access to it.

"That would be an incredibly short-sighted move."

Yes, but it has not stopped several companies to implement stuff like this to get more money.

> That would be an incredibly short-sighted move.

Companies at this level do those kinds of moves all the time.

> (…) you don't want to create the perception that (…)

Right. But that doesn’t mean they don’t want to do it, it just means they wouldn’t want you to realise they’re doing it.

> The revenue from a few ads on the free tier in exchange for limited queries to GPT-5.3 is negligible

So why chase this negligible revenue?

I suspect so that they get people used to ads so they can spam them with enough to make it not negligible. If they put millions of ads all over the page right away, it would turn everyone off. If they do the boiling frog thing and ease you into it, then people might not notice.

>The revenue from a few ads on the free tier in exchange for limited queries to GPT-5.3 is negligible compared to what they pull in from API costs and the subscription plans.

Unless they botch the implementation, it's not going to be negligible with ~800M+ free subscribers.

The real question is what do you get out of advertising to people who don't have any money? Kinda squeezing blood from a stone.

You'd be better off saying you use those people to A/B test changes and filling idle GPU batches while giving paying customers a more consistent experience.

A bunch of people pay to remove ads, and a bunch of people that are happy to give businesses their attention (view ads) I'm exchange for services... I.e. Gmail, YouTube, but don't feel they use enough / are annoyed enough to warrant $15-25/month.

Some brands are okay with impressions.. you can build trust in your product be advertising it for weeks/months and when the user does make a purchase that brand is on the mind.

> The real question is what do you get out of advertising to people who don't have any money?

Psychographic data. What they learn from these folks will create the most powerful manipulation technology yet.

There's lots of people who are willing to spend a lot of money on 'real things' while not spending anything on bytes. It's the tech companies which have created this expectation of free services. Many non-tech people I know are relatively wealthy and think likes this.

This is like asking why you'd advertise on YouTube to people who aren't paying for YouTube Premium.

That's how it begins.

> The ads are for the free tier and new $8 ad-supported plan.

Dang.

> The revenue from a few ads on the free tier in exchange for limited queries to GPT-5.3 is negligible compared to what they pull in from API costs and the subscription plans. This looks like a play to justify the existence of the previously money-losing free tier as they go into an IPO. Throw some ads in there to make it closer to a neutral on the balance sheet.

Yeah, I guess this time around Sam Altman can't be lying about how many Monthly Active Users he has.

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