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Comment by dependsontheq | Hacker News Reader

There are only two successful ad business forms in the digital world, attention or intent. Meta is built on attention and Google and others like amazon are built on intent.

Everything else is optimizing the targetting data in some kind of behavioral way to get better intent data or to reach the right users.

I have no idea where something like Chatgpt stands on that axis, it has actually very little attention (in hours per day) for most people and I am not sure that it has enough intent signals.

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Wouldn't the idea be to leverage inattention: people delegating their purchasing decisions to the chatbot without realizing that it's on the take?

LLMs are great for product research, as in "I want to buy X, what brands are there and what are the pros/cons and what do users report".

Lots of potential to game the results there. If that is enough to sustain the business is another question.

They are only great right now because, unlike web search, results are not yet sufficiently gamed and monetized.

There was a time, in an age long gone, when a cursory web search was great for product research too.

> Meta is built on attention and Google and others like amazon are built on intent

I'm having trouble seeing the difference. They both capitalise on attention, i.e. eyeballs. And they both try to predict what you're likely to click on so they can show you the most-relevant ads.

When you use Google you are generally actively looking for something. When you use Facebook you get ads for things you aren't looking for.

I get that from the product perspective. I'm just not seeing it from the ad side. Attention is a prerequisite to serving an ad. Correctly predicting intent is how you maximise its value.

Parent is presumably making the case (and I'm assuming this extends to their respective ad pricing models) that it's revenue equivalent but profitable either way.

Either you have intent but little attention (Google et al.) and so can charge a decent amount.

Or you have lots of attention but little intent (Facebook et al.) and so can charge a decent amount.

You can't charge a decent amount if you have little intent and little attention.

OpenAI presumably has intent, but hasn't done all the Google-esque adtech sausage making to expose that to ad space buyers.

Yes it's basically very little but very valuable attention with a clear current intent of buying.

Let's say a search term like "apartment for sale in Dallas", I think 15 years ago one of the highest grossing search keywords was something like "asbestos cancer lawyer".

And Meta has incredible amounts of behavioral data but is usually not that close to the thing I want to do right in this moment, they closed that gap.

Open AI has a very good psychological profile, very little current intent and very little attention, but this might change.

> When you use Facebook you get ads for things you aren't looking for.

When you use Facebook you get ads for things you are looking for in a broad sense, they just happen to figure out what you are looking for via fingerprinting and spying on all your web and app activity (to the maximum extent allowed by platforms and regulators).

Google, of course, also does this in addition to looking at your currently active web search.

Sure, they retarget ads they think you might want to see, but the difference is when using Google you are actively looking for something, not passively.

Sure but I still don't think there is much meaningful difference.

Google looks at both your current search/browse activity and gathered data (the gathered data being especially important for all the very many Google-served Ads off of google.com)

Facebook also looks at your current search/browse activity and gathered data.

The only real difference is Facebook search is universally entirely worthless so far less of that signal gets used relative to more passive snooping.

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