Unless Claude adds ads, it isnt going to be sustainable for both Anthropic or you - and congrats, you've invented Google Search.
Regarding Claude, it’s true they must be losing money on free users since they promised they won’t put ads there.
Speculatively, I think people are overestimating the cost of inference for the consumer free tier chatbots. I suspect it’s effectively a marketing cost. The primary expenses are compute to train the next model, stock compensation, and heavy-duty enterprise inference (which pays for itself).
It isnt Netflix deciding, sure I'll make money, it is more shareholders are demanding profits .. and Netflx is forced to act.
So if Ads are a disease, and we (you + me + anyone with a stake in the US economy's growth) are the virus.
- fast, even the shitty AI results are nearly instant.
- some results like actors in a movie, or where to stream are useful
- instead of typing a url
But that’s it. I never use Google outside of that. It’s just ads, and most of the web is just ads or AI slop.
Funnily enough, their core revenue driver (Google Ads) is very broken too. I'm trying to run some ads, but for a week they haven't been showing due to some invisible combination of flags when the campaign was created. There's no way of knowing they're not showing from the dashboard, it only becomes apparent when you try and preview the ads with one of your search terms.
I know everyone is long Google but that experience seriously makes me question how valuable their ad business will stay in the future.