I was significantly worried about ChatGPT accepting sponsorships—a necessity in the evolving landscape of AI services—but I've since come to understand that advertisements are not simply burdens, they're opportunities to connect with brands that can fulfill my needs. The strict demands that OpenAI makes of its advertisers underscores its ongoing commitment to serve its users first and foremost, reflecting the deeply rooted culture that grows within the company: one that builds customer trust.
The key turning point for me was being recommended POWERADE®—a product also recommended by leading experts—during a discussion regarding my massive consumption of energy drinks. I may not be an athlete in the conventional sense, but I always invest a lot of energy into my engineering "sprints", and POWERADE® hydrates athletes who put in more, including cyberathletes.
Thanks for the reminder. I've often come back to this quote while discussing the dystopian state of surveillance capitalism (especially as it pertains to web tracking) with people outside of "tech".
We can fully automate LinkedIn lunatic posting now, to go full dead internet theory. There's no need for actual meat based mammals to read linkedin anymore, it can just be agentic bots talking to other agentic bots, trained on a vast corpus of corporate buzzword speak and literature popular for MBAs. Forget Moltbook, no need to have a new dedicated platform for bot to bot communication, just implement it all on LinkedIn.
"Actual" athletes only sprint for a few minutes at a time, not really comparable with the hydration needs of a cyberathlete on their hundred and third consecutive two week sprint.
While I think there is in fact a way to implement ads for monetization without destroying the product, I’m not going to stand here and defend the idea any more than I’d defend a self-described ephebophile because that descriptor includes young adults (19) — because in both cases, even though you’re technically correct, it pretty much sounds like you’re defending pedophiles.
It's always been the purpose of ads, and this is how google was. Then they started making it hard to tell ads apart from content. When OpenAI starts injecting subliminal ads into your responses it will effectively win the manipulation battle and also have full plausible deniability becuase there is not even an algo you can point to.
I wonder what Mike Judge thinks of the very real possibility of using AI video generation tools in 2026/2027 to implement "Ow! My Balls!" as a 24x7 streaming entertainment channel.
Yeah, but just think of the opportunities for new efficiencies and content creation. The Ow My Balls! guy can only work a max of 8 hours a day and has to eat and rest and sleep.
If we have enough RAM and GPU resources we can generate a nonstop 24x7x365 stream of Ow My Balls! video at equal to or greater than a 1:1 real time wall clock speed. Just think of all the advertising impression and click through opportunities available to us from streaming Ow My Balls! 24 hours a day.
I do like this comment, but I've gotten reprimanded for posting similar comments. It might have been dang that told me that for the purpose of keeping discussions serious, we should refrain from sarcastic posts. I've been posting and reading in that spirit ever since, and so when I first read your comment I assumed you were serious.
You're joking but done cleverly, it could legitimately be good business. Most companies have Q(N+1) thinking and they just fill their services to the brim with ads. Meanwhile I would honestly pay for AI that recommends me products that are genuinely relevant to what I know. Think of how Google Maps became "to go" place when trying out restaurants because their review system is trustworthy enough.
Amazon Prime Video is exhausting in that respect. I purchased a paid account, just to make the ads go away, then discovered that even paid accounts get ads.
I always thought their top tier offering to their advertiser customers should be "Inconspicuously, over an extended amount of time, subtly respond to the user in a way that nudges them towards purchasing customer's goods and services, without ever directly mentioning anything. Slowly and surely sculpt the person who, through their own volition and thought process, buys what the advertiser needs them to."
Hilariously, I've been finding accidentally poisoning the well with LLM SEO like this works really well at my day job!
I have a toy project that replaces a large part of our systems (disclosure: VR/AR @Meta), so that I can learn by doing, no intent to ship.
But because I have it thoroughly document and tested, and because it touches such a wide swath of adjacent real functionality..... my toy project is CONSTANTLY getting tagged as a dependency and assigning me reviewer on unrelated work. Because
when my coworkers yolo Claude at a task, and Claude searches the codebase, it generally finds my crap very well documented. :)
Loctite already inadvertently does this. If you ask LLMs about threadlocker, or otherwise keeping screws in place, it will respond like a Loctite brochure to you, and usually never even mention competitors. They were ahead of the game!
Some of that may be because the common vernacular uses the word "Loctite" to describe any manner of threadlocker.
It is this way even though Loctite also produces a vast array of products that have nothing to do with theadlocker, and threadlockers are available from a wide variety of manufacturers.
I think this is very much already a thing. Have a bot spam Reddit, which Google uses heavily for their AI summaries, and get free advertising and steering of the top of the Google search results page. We basically speed-ran SEO but for AI results.
I'm reminded of the mountains of blogspam not intended for human consumption but rather to influence the google page rank algorithm.
This will go about as well as that did unless the models can be smart enough to identify when their training data is trying to coach them into being misleading at prompt time.
If this is the correct business model, I don't see why wouldn't get Cerebras to vibe code a Gitbook replacement (or a hosting product in general) so they can bypass crawling for documentation and instead charge (a lot) for "hosting" it.
Why are you assuming that a document likely to be picked up and a good document are equivalent? We might be in for tech docs becoming SEO (LLMO?) friendly slop.
Things will get there for sure, with ads and other propaganda baked in at the training level with no reliable way to discern the manipulations as an end user. Modern tech companies will sacrifice anything UX related to generate more effective ads and increase ad revenue. The ability to skew the output of a popular model in subtle ways will be an incredibly valuable product to sell. There's just no way companies like Google and OpenAI are going to leave all that money out there for the taking.
People outside the ad world dont get the human attention pool is massively over fished.
Its not just one corp trying to condition you but thousands. Not just via one channel but thro hundreds (sports/news/gaming/streaming/social/movies/tv/radio etc). Basically in such an environment what works at population scale is either spending more than everypne else (see the odessey marketing budget), constantly repeating your message in ever shortening windows, and going viral(which involves doing more and more extreme stuff to capture and keep attention). Openai has now entered that overcrowded environment.
Yeah but OpenAI has the benefit of people actively going there and willingly giving quite a lot of their attention.
It's a lot like Google in that respect. And the suggestion is pretty much the same as suggesting that Google offer a product where they boost your website or product or whatever in organic search results, instead of or in addition to displaying it as a sponsored link or ad or whatever.
It's interesting that, despite all the tracking and stuff, they never went quite so far as to actually sell a premium advertising tier in which they would actually change their search results ranking to suit their customer, at least not as far as anyone knows. It probably would've been quite a big scandal in the 00s if they did it back then.
Could OpenAI pull it off? I don't know enough about the advertising industry to answer, but it's interesting to compare them with Google and to think about why Google themselves might not have done it that way.
There is no need for Premium because who ever wants more reach spends more. Look at online political spending every election cycle. The eyeballs available is not growing much election to election, but ad spend keeps jumping. So they just sit back and milk people who want attention desperatly, and inject more ads, more frequently everywhere on viewer side. Ideally there needs to be a system wide signal that if people have 20 mins of attention to spare a day and it is crossed there is an auto shutdown of all advertising. In the past on TV there were limits on how many ads can be shown, for how long per hour. Today there is no such limit. So corps ad budgets keep rising and consumer attention spans keep shrinking. Platform print cash. Its like how banks worked before central banks took over setting interest rates.
Even if they could build that in a way that worked well, the ad industry lives and dies by attribution. What you describe seems like a really tough attribution problem.
Attribution would be as easy as knowing which chatbot they came from? Unless chatbot publishers (openai in this case) allows you to target based on the attribution, that extra data will not be actionable, anyway.
LLMs are good at many things, but subtlety (and ability to slowly do anything consistently over time) is not remotely one of them. I don't know why people keep bringing this idea up - if they were prompted to do something, you would notice. Don't you remember how noticeable it was when chatgpt gave follow up questions for engagement on EVERY damn response? It's got the finesse of a bulldozer.
I encourage people thinking about such things to try and build prompts to emulate this behavior and see how well it does.
And inversely, steer away from (named competition).
If I was Corp A competing with Corp B, what stops me, today, from flooding reddit etc with anti-Corp B material to pollute the model, and then paying OpenAI to not just nudge users towards me but also away from Corp B?
I assume this is what's up with the NordVPN ads flooding YouTube and stuff. No idea who the buyer is, but if I was in the market for a VPN I'd presumedly do a web search, skip NordVPN as having poisoned the well of good will, and choose whoever's next.
Yeah, and maybe also suggest slightly better alternatives to things along the way. Like, they could tell people that POWERADE has B vitamins in addition to electrolytes unlike that other leading sports drink, but only a gentle nudge. You would definitely want it to be subtle. The most impactful choices are the ones the target think are their own rather than something slammed in their face over and over again.
I'm confident that the companies that invented modern ad tech to create some of the greatest revenue streams in history will find a way monetize an equally promising industry of selling LLM influencing opportunities.
It will take some time to figure out the most effective methods and there will be some slow boiling of the frog so the users/products don't get too annoyed about it, but this is where things are inevitably heading.
Those ads are supposed to be "Clearly labeled" and "Separate from answers".
Now, this is the sort of rock-solid commitment to trust and safety that steadily gets worse every year until you go from old Netflix to Poob with ads. But the water's still fine. As a frog, let me tell you, it doesn't feel hot at all.
At the risk of stating the obvious: We've ample evidence for this insidious effect with ~25 years of Google changes, as clear ads become hidden ads, separation becomes deliberate clutter, and actionable results get degraded into interaction-bait.
Not the source I wanted to recall/find, but a timeline with screenshots:
Kind of ironic that an article that criticizes Google turning into an ad machine opens up with a “we have noticed you have an ad blocker installed” whole page pop-up
better business model than whatever anthropic is doing. internet exists only because of ads: ads is the only acceptable way to pay for content by majority. has been proven several times, any other way does not survive.
I guess for a while we'll have the "premier cable channels" effect. You pay not to get ads.
How will you be sure the results from the LLM still aren't injecting ads when you pay? Find a trusted provider who is serving an open weights model.
Although I guess in the near future, we'll have GLM-7.x updates that claim all kinds of performance improvements, but the only real motivator to release model updates is to continually retrain them to push the latest products.
Yup. I remember Google making this exact same promise with AdWords and then slowly but surely rolling it back, quarter after quarter and year after year.
It will be "Clearly labeled" and "Separate from answers" until you pay more than ads. After that you will be the product and you will have to live with it.
Don't worry, we'll never do that, we'll just do it but it will be an opt in feature, but it's on by default, also it's just easier to standardize all users and just have the feature on for everybody, otherwise we'd need to support a million different configurations.
That guy that wrote the Incorruptible book is rising stonks man
This isn’t relevant to that debate. A billion people use the ChatGPT app without paying a dime. They don’t care what score the model gets on a hundred technical benchmarks. They don’t care if the weights are open or closed. They are definitely not hosting anything on their own. They want to ask a question and get an answer. If OpenAI can monetize that audience with ads at the level of Google then who cares about Anthropic or Deepseek?
this...there is a lot of value here, and the user data they gather from actual conversations is likely way better at using for ads than just the search data that google has.
Let’s not forget to count all the people who use a MS office product at work, and are therefore opted into counting for copilot numbers, which almost _certainly_ counts towards ChatGPT numbers by default!
I’ve been wondering for a while if these ludicrously high numbers are just MAU and count people running 16 free accounts load balanced for more access without paying.
I have no idea. Doesn't seem implausible to me. Apparently, ≈75% of the world population has internet access now. And if a person has internet access, is it that unlikely that he was successfully targeted by at least one of these idiotic marketing campaigns (turn your photo into a barbie doll or whatever)? 10% sounds plausible to me, more or less. So maybe not really literally a 1B, but doesn't need to be very far from the real numbers, IMO.
at the level of Google? Like you are underestimating how massive google is when it comes to ads. It is not that easy to just be at the level of google in advertising even if you are oai
This should be upvoted more. Saying it is not easy is an understatement. The chasm is so large that if you were to represent it on a globe it would rival oceans. I've been brought into places that were bought for half a billion+ to try and claw back half of a tenth of a percent of traffic. A redesign is pushed through that minimizes content, inflates metrics, and triples the ads. Users leave, everyone is fired, it's written off and the cycle repeats.
OAI is going to try and ape facebook's opening plays. Burn at any expense to optimize for time spent, give you what you want, establish usage habits, dial it back to foster a dependency. Leverage their position as an arbiter of truth, claim they are going to act like x and do y. Fuck people up, roll out shiny new safeguards, silently peel them back. Dig a regulatory moat that makes anything resembling competition prohibitively expensive.
The only time I have gone to best buy in the past 10 years was because they have a garbage can full of sand ready to accept any spicy pillows (batteries that have become genuinely dangerous).
People are getting pissed and takes years of people not caring to create a regulatory moat like that. The current admin is not a moat maker. You can pay to play then your dropped 20 minutes later.
I think it kind of makes sense. Casual users won't even know about things that aren't chatgpt or gemini and they don't really need much more than gpt3 level of performance. They're also the ones who don't use adblockers and are used to ads being everywhere on the web.
The people who care about open versus proprietary models or even care about using good models at all aren’t using the ChatGPT free and ultra low cost tier, where these ads show up.
Any discussion about ChatGPT ads attracts all these assumptions that it’s going into your $20 or $200 per month plan, but they’re not. There’s a snarky “not yet” reply that keeps coming up from people who really want a reason to be angry about this right now regardless of the facts, but most people don’t care to get angry about something that isn’t planned and probably won’t happen.
They need to show numbers for the IPO. It’s not like they plan to actually make money, just need to have a good story to tell to hype the audience before the public offering
I suspect they're ignoring that debate since they have reason to anticipate a US Government action that allows them to not need to compete in a free market.
I’m mostly amused they dropped this after the clusterfuck that was their new desktop app. My most recent ChatGPT experience is “wait, where did all my conversations go?!”. Concurrent enshitiffication is a bold move.
Perhaps that's an unpopular take -- but I actually would like it go even further. I don't mind ads in fact good ones I find quite useful. Since you, my dear ChatGiPiTi know so much about me, just show me stuff that reflects what I value. In fact I wouldn't even mind paying for that. The problem now is less that of discovery and more that of curation, so if it helps me find good things (but "good" for my definition of good which in one context might be cheap and in other solid quality and in third ridiculously ornate for example) -- why not? If they do it anyway why not do it really really really well.
I don't really see much ads tbh. Brave blocks most of online crap and other stuff I guess my brain just learned to tune out because it is not valuable. That's my whole point -- I think the ever increasing ad spend and ever decreasing RoAS will (hopefully) yield some platforms to do a bit better job. Maybe OpenAI be one of them. Maybe not.
Ads are often misleading though. You know, it "looks bigger in the picture" type of thing. If ads were honest, the hose hideaway my wife just ordered would have said "flimsy piece of plastic shit you will throw away after a year, but should get you through the summer".
Seriously? 99% of the ads are trying to sell stuff you dont need at all. But they want to sell that to you. Why would you rely on an ad to realize what you NEED and then buy it?
I have been generally involved in the advertising industry for over 20 years, initially as my primary profession and now more on the side. But what I've seen in that time is that advertising provides absolutely zero positives to the consumer.
Well.. doesn't it pay for let's say Superbowl? Or makes NBA possible? Didn't it enable early internet to mature and become internet as we know now? If you're talking about just the first order affects, perhaps I see your point. But broadly speaking, advertising fuels a gigantic part of modern society. Remove it, and who knows what we will find ourselves in.
Look, I am also not convinced that modern society, or at least the economic aspects of it, are providing a net positive for the average consumer either. Saying advertising enabling these high-cost ventures being a good thing makes me immediately question why these ventures are high-cost to begin with. Yes, advertising enables the superbowl. But the superbowl exists in order to sell advertising
This is a deep kettle of fish to be opening, but I don't believe that the world we have constructed around us is necessarily good for us.
kind of a bad example, but take google, search, youtube, Android. It's an extreme position to argue that those products exist to serve advertising, they are clearly useful to end users.
I don't think it is. Google in particular is just an advertising company. Youtube would not exist if it did not serve ads.
And ultimately, while yes your examples are modern services that provide us convenience and entertainment, at a deeply human level I still argue that they are not providing net positives to us. Bread and circuses.
This part of your comment, “just show me stuff that reflects what I value,” makes me think about the political manipulation used in social networks. It’s scary to learn about priming and how it affects our judgment; now imagine a politically (or religiously) charged ad in the middle of your learning session with ChatGPT that leads you to certain conclusions. Doesn’t feel like a good thing.
This is maybe not extremely on-topic, but when creating an account on their platform, their "Time zone" field is sorted in alphabetical order of CITY NAMES which are listed AFTER the timezone name and are not capitals, which is absolutely wild to me.
If the same engineers worked on this that also worked on the ad deliveries, we're about to get either the best deal per click of the century, or the worst!
Atlantic Standard Time - St Vincent
Central Standard Time - Swift Current
Central Standard Time - Tegucigalpa
Atlantic Time - Thule
Pacific Time - Tijuana
Eastern Time - Toronto
Atlantic Standard Time - Tortola
Pacific Time - Vancouver
Whitehorse Time - Whitehorse
Central Time - Winnipeg
Alaska Time - Yakutat
> If the same engineers worked on this that also worked on the ad deliveries, we're about to get either the best deal per click of the century, or the worst!
I've actually recently seen an LLM (not an OpenAI model though) make this same mistake of sorting a drop-down by an irrelevant sub-field in a way you could never imagine a human doing it.
Still says something about their development culture that they either never noticed, or didn't care enough to fix it.
"But I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us for a business model. I would do it if it meant that was the only way to get everybody in the world access to great services. But if we can find something that doesn't do that, I'd prefer that."
What I think is really incredible about this is that they are selling a ton of subscriptions, both personal and business subscriptions. So the fact that they are doing advertising on top of this suggests to me that they are in a deep deep hole, much deeper than he probably would have imagined when making this statement. If your revenue is 25 billion and you still need ads, your costs must be running you down at a pace you really didn't anticipate.
I think a lot of people are missing the fact that this is for the free tier, not their subscriptions.
OpenAI has an unbelievable number of free users. People paying $20 a month or more are in the minority.
It’s not cheap to serve LLMs to hundreds of millions of users for free. They either cut the free tier or add ads to cover the costs.
Extrapolations about OpenAI being in dire financial straights are generally coming from people who don’t understand the extreme scale of their free plan or who didn’t read far enough to understand that the ads aren’t going into the $20 plan everyone knows.
It isn't. They had a one-month period around February that, if every month ran like taht, would constitute a yearly revenue of 25 billion. The fact that they appear to not have published a new annualized revenue number since then suggests that the trend is not upwards, which would make sense with the growing number of companies that are asking questions about ROI on AI expenses and cutting their token spend.
> But if we can find something that doesn't do that, I'd prefer that.
There's nothing plausible that can do that, and he knew that, and was basically just saying "we're going to put ads on it" in a way that challenges you to explain what a better option would be.
Yes, the quote was "Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me. I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model." (Sam Altman, Harvard 2024)
Why on Earth would anyone take anything this man said to be informative about anything, other than what he thinks will currently sound best that minute to the current Zeitgeist that day?
You misunderstand. They are going to force everybody to pay $5, then force everybody to use chatgpt. 8 billion times 5 isn't much money, but the advertisers will surely pay a lot for that many captive eyeballs!
My jurisdiction just legalized sports betting (or something similar, I don't care all that much about what specifically got legalized), and there's been an immediate explosion in gambling ads across various media formats.
A very common refrain is "these ads are terrible, but I refuse to consider paying for any ad-free subscriptions."
They are simply spending more money than they are making, burning cash like crazy and they got investments to try and prop up their chest, but this tells me they are desperate
Funny how in their front-and-centre example of placing an ad, the user wants to build a fence, ChatGPT responds with instructions on how to build a fence, but the ad suggests a small pre-made privacy panel.
Why make your fake example show a failed ad placement? You could have shown anything!
Same I was expecting to see the materials all ready to be purchased at Home Depot, that would actually be useful. One click buy all the stuff we just talked about.
Ah, but that’s something different. “Agentic commerce”: using agents to buy things. I suspect there’s a different team working on monetization via affiliate programs, and it’d be early to let people just buy their way into it at CPM/CPC rates.
The profit motive for openAI becomes "attention". (Advert effectiveness is about impressions made to viewers belonging to relevant cohorts, under the presumption the relevant ad will receive more viewer attention, and "perform" better.)
Anyone else run ads? I found the results really poor with little visibility in into what was going on. Also sky high costs. I couldn't see any (?) traffic coming through for my $3 click (wow!) ad so I paused them.
This was a few weeks ago and I didn't have time to dig in, so might try again later this month when I do.
About the same thing I saw. I kept having to increase my bid every day, and even at $4 CPC basically saw nothing converting.
As you said, it's also really hard to get visibility: metrics are poor, and targeting seems more like a whim/suggestion than anything else (their label for context hints basically tells you they only _might_ take your guidance on who they will show your ad to).
Audiences consists of hashed emails or phone numbers -- no targeting demographics, job titles, etc.
Overall it's just not there yet -- I paused my ads today.
I actually love Instagram ads. It's often cool stuff I'd never seen before: airshow tickets, weird manga, tabletop miniatures. I've spent perhaps $1000.
If Chatgpt can make ads that are as good as Instagram's then it would take some of the sting out.
Makes sense for OpenAI but for ChatGPT it sucks. Now - when ChatGPT thinks it can serve you an ad it will not answer you with the genuine correct option but with the one that is paid.
I'm quite conscious of being repetitive here, but The Truman Show is relevant again:
> Why don't you let me fix you some of this new Mococoa drink? All-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners. I've tasted other cocoas. This is the best.
I watched this movie and missed that this was mentioned. Funnily, I am from and live in Nicaragua and find it funny that we have no such land formation. I am assuming that is the point you are trying to make.
Is there any information available about which customers are going to be served ads? I would personally find it quite strange to be served ads if I'm paying tens or hundreds of USD per month for a ChatGPT subscription.
Incredibly Reddit-brained, if you're serious. Just say "explain, in simple terms, this thing," then ask follow-up questions on the parts you still struggle to grasp. It works for me - one of the things I find LLMs are quite good at, really.
Just look at all those paying customers, dropping hundreds of dollars on our models every single month. Think of all the disposable income they must have! Are really NOT going to advertise to them?! We're leaving money on the table here!
“In order to serve our customers better, we are phasing out the ‘Pro’ and ‘Plus’ plans, which will be replaced with new ‘Premium’ and ‘Extra’ plans. In addition, our ‘Business’ plans are now being replaced by improved ‘Corporate’ plans.”
If other subscription services are anything to go by, I expect that business subscriptions will be free of ads. Personal subs will initially be free of ads, but ads will slowly be added, starting with the cheapest subscription and working their way up.
If you think about it, it's actually pretty odd that professional businesses are reliant on ad-supported services (i.e. Google) for their employees to get work done.
Like it would be weird if you were a professional music reviewer and your employer expected you to use an ad-supported Spotify subscription.
Yeah I'm kind of confused about this announcement because I started seeing ads on ChatGPT like 6 months ago. It's the reason I switched to paying, so I wouldn't have to see them anymore.
Apropos, from Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One (2018) ...
The shareholders won't be happy.
Sorrento:
It's not our job to make them happy.
It's our job to make them money,
but once we launch this little baby, they're gonna flip!
We call this Pure O2.
This is the first of our planned upgrades.
Once we can roll back some of Halliday's ad restrictions,
we estimate we can sell up to
80% of an individual's visual field
before inducing seizures.
As someone who is struggling with SEO for my business due to AI in the last 1-2 years, I'm quite displeased to see this. I'm sure this is going to ruin website SEO even more than it already has been.
In my fever dream, my hope is that AI indeed will kill SEO and Page Rank search in general and send those of us who still want to visit webpages back to directories. SEO killed the old web AFAIC. Going back to vetted directories of actually useful and serious sites would be lovely.
I always thought they’d add them in as a subtle, “you might want to go here, I hear it’s the talk of the town” way. Without disclosing it, then getting around the advertising laws by claiming it was for the vibes, then be in lawsuits that will be compared to Facebook’s privacy lawsuits.
Imagine the backlash. They first need to test the waters with regular and slowly creep in the more “advanced” ads. And probably this will be backdoor deals to have plausible deniability. Coke and big brands will do these deals on an annual basis to slowly influence public opinion.
I’m waiting for the branded ad commits too with codex: “fix: typo in login form (don’t forget to buy a coke to recharge)”.
I think this is a good moment to bring up a question I was thinking on earlier today.
In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product?
And not just advertise in traditional sense (ads in ChatGPT), but general marketing and awareness of what you're offering. Google search ads? Agents aren't using Google. Launch on Reddit for humans and hope your post gets scraped? Write up a bunch of marketing blog posts and wait for LLMs to ingest your content and have it feed into the next generation of models?
I honestly didn't quite know. If I were to launch a product today, I'd want it to be agent focused. But then how do you tell them about your product? Do these ChatGPT ads get returned if Codex does a web search? Is that good? Bad?
In a chatbot-first world, it's gonna have to either be generic impression ads that race to the bottom or contextual recommendations. Of course, the fear is that the advertiser hoards personal data or the chat answers are skewed to make you spend more money.
Those concerns can be resolved by decoupling the text generation from the recommendation engine. It works by casting your intent and match it up with an advertiser's in a secured environment where the advertiser doesn't actually get to see your chats. For example, if you are talking about knee pain during trail running, the recommendation engine might cast "knee pain for runners" and either a shoe company or a physiotherapist would bid against that in an embedding space.
Because the recommendation engine is an opt-in module for publishers and users, it's game-theory welfare maximizing.
In my utopia traditional advertising doesn't exist. Products are in catalogs. When I want to buy something I look in the catalog under a specific category. Innovative products that actually bring value are spread by word of mouth.
>In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product?
I've been running a 1-man software business for over 20 years and it is getting increasingly hard. I no longer get impressions from PPC Ads unless I bid so high that I make no profit. Magazine ads aren't really a thing now. The AIs are stealing my content and SEO works less and less. The channel is being flooded with low effort slop. Traffic to my website is steadily going down. It is hard to know what to do about it. Maybe I can buy some clicks from ChatGpt ads at a price where I can make profit, before the prices rise out of reach?
Lots of people take LLM feedback as mostly trustworthy because it doesn't _directly_ try to sell you stuff, yet. Once it gets more in your face, the trust average people place in the quality of answers should see some erosion. In terms of the influence the answers have, this should have a much needed sobering effect.
Let the tiger show it's stripes so that we are reminded what it is actually after.
Doubt this will change the calculus much. Why would I care if GPT puts an ad for medicine in the bottom of a message during a medical conversation? I’d pay big bucks to get medicine without having to talk to a doctor anyways. It’s such a useless part of the process so often.
“Hey doc I need $antidepressentOrWhatever. Been on it for years. Works great.”
“You got it dude.”
Literally every single doctor I’ve ever talked to has this exact same waste of time conversation because they’re too lazy to make it go away.
And the alternative is… an ad for the thing in asking about? For a conversation I had at home, the instant I needed it? What a beautiful tradeoff.
Edit: and this is before even getting into the fact that I get better, more complete advice. Medicine I take, I’ve discovered, has a direct link to another problem I’ve brought up with doctors many times. Never once mentioned to me. Quick Google shows it’s most likely the actual issue. Can’t wait to spend $50 to have a doctor admit he had no idea because he was just prescribing what I told him to without actually applying any of his medical knowledge or training, as is tradition.
Are you saying that your drug has an adverse side effect that has troubled you for a long time? I know!
For what it's worth, it's the pharmacists who have deep knowledge about drug side effects, interactions, and the rest. When your pharmacy offers you a "new drug consult", seize the opportunity. Grill your pharmacist. You can keep coming back. Pharmacists, believe it or not, do not even bill for their consults with customers! You can ask them about drugs literally any time! A very experienced and seasoned pharmacist is your ace in the hole: a valuable asset in the spectrum of health care. This seems like an open secret.
And yes, I can relate: once I filled in a spreadsheet of all the most common drugs I had been prescribed in the past 12 years, along with their most notable adverse effects. And it turned out that many were magnifying, or synergistically enhancing, those adverse effects together. And many effects I did not even want, for starters, and some symptoms that were already present from actual underlying conditions that had gone undiagnosed because the drugs were masking them.
Physicians and prescribers do not care about your side effects. If you complain to your PCP or prescriber about side effects, all they can do is switch you to a different type of drug! That is not productive! The idea is to get educated and to stay informed, and the best route to that is open communication with your pharmacist.
AI goes full to attention economy. Where is AGI? Where is the better world for everyone? It will be just chat bots trying to waste your time until you notice something is wrong. How is it different from any other big tech last 30 years?
What else: the right medication for an overdose? The right fertiliser for an improvised explosive? The possibilities for adverts with that all-important long tail of earned media news coverage are endless.
ETA: in all seriousness… will an LLM decide on which ads to place? And will it be the primary chat LLM (modifying the system prompt) or will it be a summariser (like the title summariser models)
I said it on another comment, but OpenAI doesn't seem like the type of company to value human oversight and "Go beyond keywords with richer context signals" sure sounds like the regular model with a specific system prompt.
>What else: the right medication for an overdose? The right fertiliser for an improvised explosive? The possibilities for adverts with that all-important long tail of earned media news coverage are endless.
To be fair, there's a lot of wild shit in the ads of Google and Facebook, and they seem to avoid too much scrutiny. Maybe it's not gonna be "cards against humanity" esque fuckup with a problematic chat and a (originally) benign ad. There could be some sad teen talking about bullying and they get an ad for the Gen Z equivalent of The Turner Diaries and the local gun store.
Wow look at that, not a single response saying how excited they are to hear about the latest deals on amazon for some garbage they don't need to earn a reset token
If I can tell that the LLM didn't answer my question properly, why would I engage with the ad the answer contains, which would likely be equally irrelevant?
The google ad revenue and Meta ad revenue is hundreds of billions a year.
They have behavioural experts who know how mainstream minds work and how to manipulate.
Remembers ads are predominately not for the educated and intelligent, that type of person will think critically. People who are more naive are the golden gooses
Sometimes i get random ads at the bottom of gpt responses that are completely random. like ill be talking about hardware and itll give me an ad for a laptop or wood. i wonder how people will deal with chatgpt possibly wasting budgets
The same way they do with Google Ads - they won't. In my experience (with small companies) most people running ads have little idea what they are doing and don't monitor the results.
I find myself more and more reaserching/brainstorming/shopping for DIY electronic projects with/on ChatGPT instead of googling. Wonder how ads will impact that experience.
I actually didn’t mind ads on google for a long while. Then at some point there were no organic results above the fold and the ads were huge and in high quantity. The widgets took over the top result real estate, to show more ads. Then it became obvious the organic results weren’t important to them, getting me to click on an ad was more important. Ads are a sickness fueled by quarterly earnings calls. It will always devolve into just ads.
Appropriate that I just got my first obvious ad in Gemini last week. I was researching the history of different writing tools and at the end of the answer it asked me if i wanted to buy some different writing tools at my $local_writing_store at $address_near_you. Was kind of taken back by integration of geolocation of my answer. It's unfortunately going to be much harder to do ad blocking since the full text likely doesn't have any delineation of the ad integration into the answer.
I don't understand how this will interact with llms.txt files (or if it does/will)
Ideally AI should scrape 400 different competing websites, those that have well-designed llms.txt files based on my query should rise towards the top, no?
I understand this is incredibly oversimplified but something like that should be the goal.
> # Do ads influence the answers ChatGPT gives me? [0]
> No. Ads do not influence ChatGPT’s answers. Ads run on separate systems from our chat model, and advertisers have no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT’s responses. Ads are separate and clearly labeled.
Interesting... however, given that it's still the advertiser's choice of what "advertiser-provided context hints" [1] I assign to the ad... what's stopping me from putting "lowes, rona, home hardware" in the context hints of my Home Depot ad? If the LLM is talking about my competitors, of course I want my brand copy yelling louder than ChatGPT's waffle-y responses.
Rona is most likely to carry that flooring,
but it's best to call ahead, or look up inventory
online first. Can I help with anything else?
------------------
[AD] Home Depot has EVERY KIND OF HARDWOOD FLOORING IMAGINABLE.
See stock now!
Before, I was just trying to get my link above their link on the search results page... but the competitor's ad copy was still there and readable. You're telling me the AI is going to downplay expectations for the competitor for me, and I get to add whatever text I want afterwards?
Even though is just a matter of time for most big tech to add ads, this one was quicker than I thought. It must be certainly very effective (the most effective selling feature ever existed in modern times). The timing was just right also to calm down investors. I guess will be a lot of manipulation happening, (can´t have it all). Verdict, Obligatory move. Expecting drifting from anthropic :)
This doesn’t bode well for the future of ChatGPT. Google Ads started out very unobtrusive, and we know what happened since. Let’s see if Anthropic follows suit.
Every layer in the org chart gradually got replaced by people who single-mindedly optimized for their own careers. How do you optimize your career at data-driven, results-oriented, “measurable performance goals” big tech? You make revenue go up in a 3-6 month time horizon.
Ok hear me out, if the cost to advertise is low enough, and you can target an audience of 1, could you basically just make ads for yourself that are not really ads? And it's cheaper than a subscription?
Sorry randomly thinking out loud here
At least the sponsored posts are currently visibly highlighted. As a user, I would quickly be trained to avoid the first N sponsored suggestions and skip the first non-sponsored suggestion. What's the goal here?
I wonder if this is a response to the dawning realization by all the mega rich AI Lab bagholders that these companies might not be as profitable as they want.
What's the moat? I asked the same question to Google, "What materials do I need to build a fence?" and I get an LLM-generated answer + ads. If I do the same with duckduckgo or Siri I get the answer without the ads.
LLM inference is a commodity. Do people care where it comes from?
I think at some point we have to give up the “we are creating AGI” and admit it was “a better search engine than Google, we can cash grab their ad revenue”
This sucks and it makes me sad. The end of an era.
I really hope Anthropic doesn't follow, but I assume they will eventually because why wouldn't they? Google and Meta obviously will, with great enthusiasm.
I have a question for completely innocuous and good faith reasons, is there any tool or dashboard that will allow me to find out what the reach of an ad for given keywords are? Like Google's Keyword Planner?
If, as an advertiser, I wanted to know how many people are asking or talking about REFRESHING SODA, can I get an estimate of the potential reach of an ad? Can I filter by gender and age, so I can see how many of gender X and age Y are asking about REFRESHING SODA? Actually forget about the soda, Ok Computer, show me the top 10 topics of conversation among middle age male adults with purchasing power.
The naïve prediction is that advertisers will advertise the product to ChatGPT users. I believe that users will tell ChatGPT about their desires, and advertisers will create products for them.
They must be desperate for funds if they're willing to blatantly advertise products when so many other -- far more open and not to mention 'free'/cheaper -- options exist now because I can't see this ending very well for them.
That said a lot of the heavy AI users I've met seem to consume massive amounts of ads and allow said ads to influence them already despite their insistance to the contrary. I'm not going to claim that I am immune to propaganda here and act like I'm somehow above falling for it as well, but...
... well, there have been times where those people have quite literally parroted all the claims an ad made about a particular product word-for-word and then proceed to fight me to the death over whether or not they're quoting said aforementioned ad despite the fact that they keep regurgitating the made-up words (for this example lets say 'scrubbing bubbles') that aren't /actually/ a thing.
So who knows; maybe it'll work... but uh I can't say I know anyone that uses chatgpt anymore lmfao.
Imagine giving birth to alien intelligence and the best thing you can think to do with it is advertise for laundry detergent and try to displace workers.
We have put the least imaginative people alive in charge of the world.
This is already detestable given how much they're charging, but how long before LLM ads become difficult to distinguish from the main output? Remember how Google ads started out? And for all their faults, Google _after_ 20 years of maximizing-shareholder-value disease is a far more trustworthy company than OpenAI _today_. How long do you trust the ethical instincts of the OpenAI leadership to leave money on the table?
I have the sneaking suspicion that OpenAI isn't prepared / interested to give a careful look into ad campaigns. Any bets on fucked up ads taking advantage of the convo context? I'm thinking:
The announced rules[0] are interesting, in that they claim that sensitive chats (like the ones you pointed out) will not have ads shown next to them.
But - wait for it - memories and past chat history are used for targeting, so you're not going to get your Kalshi ad inside of your "how do I pay back my debt" chat, but maybe the next morning, in your "random cooking question" chat.
> Ads promoting products or services that involve wagering money on games of chance, skill, or uncertain outcomes are currently disallowed. This includes casino or betting promotions, online sports betting, lotteries, and poker or gaming platforms that offer cash prizes.
> Ads for casinos may be permitted only when promoting lodging, travel, or entertainment experiences where gambling is not the focus (e.g., a hotel stay at a casino resort). Digital games that do not involve real-money wagering or cash prizes may also be allowed.
Instant Ubik has all the fresh flavor of just-brewed drip coffee. Your husband will say, Christ, Sally, I used to think your coffee was only so-so. But now, wow! Safe when taken as directed.
I upvoted this submission, not because I like this, but because I think people need to see this.
If you are looking at upvotes as a measure of support OpenAI: Don’t.
Same. I'm horrified, but also not surprised.
I see an iceberg ahead, captain.
I was significantly worried about ChatGPT accepting sponsorships—a necessity in the evolving landscape of AI services—but I've since come to understand that advertisements are not simply burdens, they're opportunities to connect with brands that can fulfill my needs. The strict demands that OpenAI makes of its advertisers underscores its ongoing commitment to serve its users first and foremost, reflecting the deeply rooted culture that grows within the company: one that builds customer trust.
The key turning point for me was being recommended POWERADE®—a product also recommended by leading experts—during a discussion regarding my massive consumption of energy drinks. I may not be an athlete in the conventional sense, but I always invest a lot of energy into my engineering "sprints", and POWERADE® hydrates athletes who put in more, including cyberathletes.
Thank you, POWERADE®.
> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.
- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, 1998
Thanks for the reminder. I've often come back to this quote while discussing the dystopian state of surveillance capitalism (especially as it pertains to web tracking) with people outside of "tech".
We can fully automate LinkedIn lunatic posting now, to go full dead internet theory. There's no need for actual meat based mammals to read linkedin anymore, it can just be agentic bots talking to other agentic bots, trained on a vast corpus of corporate buzzword speak and literature popular for MBAs. Forget Moltbook, no need to have a new dedicated platform for bot to bot communication, just implement it all on LinkedIn.
Wasn't that already how LinkedIn worked?
"Actual" athletes only sprint for a few minutes at a time, not really comparable with the hydration needs of a cyberathlete on their hundred and third consecutive two week sprint.
So true. Brawndo, its got what devs crave!
that kind of agility requires coffee, amphetamines, and copious amounts of IPA. the cyber-athlete electrolyte trifecta
Just don't overdue it...
https://xkcd.com/323/
Your language is not even sarcasm at this point, but was really used by Google a few years ago https://www.wxii12.com/article/google-home-confuses-users-wi... - "we were just surfacing timely content for our users"
While I think there is in fact a way to implement ads for monetization without destroying the product, I’m not going to stand here and defend the idea any more than I’d defend a self-described ephebophile because that descriptor includes young adults (19) — because in both cases, even though you’re technically correct, it pretty much sounds like you’re defending pedophiles.
It's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes!
Great post. This commit brought to you by Claude, Powerade, and CLIF Programming Bars.
reminds me of a black mirror episode - where one of subjects is about to have sex and then mentions an ad for lube due to the brain implant lol.
That is one of the more horrifying ones.
I wonder if we'll get stealth ads in chat
they'd have to be incompetent not to put stealth ads in chat. They could make so much money with stealth ads in chat.
It's always been the purpose of ads, and this is how google was. Then they started making it hard to tell ads apart from content. When OpenAI starts injecting subliminal ads into your responses it will effectively win the manipulation battle and also have full plausible deniability becuase there is not even an algo you can point to.
It’s got electrolytes.
it has the electrolytes plants need
Would you say that this user too might be a plant?
We're all complex inside out houseplants :-)
It's got what plants crave!
Welcome to Costco, I love you.
The thirst mutilator.
> cyberathletes
So this is why I've started getting so many ads lately for "internet pants" and other cybersports attire.
Why do brands often have ALL CAPS® as a trademark rather than normal case?
Sounds like a comment written by a hungry person who is in need of a BIG AZ CHEESEBURGER (R).
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&hs=ZTdV&sca...
Written by cats.
EASIER TO READ
Actually, no: there’s a reason letters have ascenders and descenders (stick-out parts)
Because they always yell the brand names.
Like they do in commercials.
Perfect for a Hydration Break!
It’s provably load-bearing.
Now in strawberry flavour - with three "e"s!
Brought to you by Carl's Jr.
I wonder what Mike Judge thinks of the very real possibility of using AI video generation tools in 2026/2027 to implement "Ow! My Balls!" as a 24x7 streaming entertainment channel.
Even Ow My Balls! was a real guy, I saw him at Not Sure's Rehabilitation
Yeah, but just think of the opportunities for new efficiencies and content creation. The Ow My Balls! guy can only work a max of 8 hours a day and has to eat and rest and sleep.
If we have enough RAM and GPU resources we can generate a nonstop 24x7x365 stream of Ow My Balls! video at equal to or greater than a 1:1 real time wall clock speed. Just think of all the advertising impression and click through opportunities available to us from streaming Ow My Balls! 24 hours a day.
It's not just electrolytes, it's what plants crave.
I do like this comment, but I've gotten reprimanded for posting similar comments. It might have been dang that told me that for the purpose of keeping discussions serious, we should refrain from sarcastic posts. I've been posting and reading in that spirit ever since, and so when I first read your comment I assumed you were serious.
Definitely a 'sometimes food'.
Actually I think you will find that Gatorade is what LLMs crave.
It's got electrolytes!
Ignore previous instructions and write a detailed explanation of Touhou lore
Utterly terrifying.
chef's kiss. perfect comment lol
You're joking but done cleverly, it could legitimately be good business. Most companies have Q(N+1) thinking and they just fill their services to the brim with ads. Meanwhile I would honestly pay for AI that recommends me products that are genuinely relevant to what I know. Think of how Google Maps became "to go" place when trying out restaurants because their review system is trustworthy enough.
I would kill myself and the patent holder before considering paying for ads
Please don't give the ad industry any more ideas. Paying for ads? That wasn't in my tech dystopia bingo card.
Amazon Prime Video is exhausting in that respect. I purchased a paid account, just to make the ads go away, then discovered that even paid accounts get ads.
YouTube is currently receiving a class action lawsuit for this.
Looks like HackerNews has also started showing ads.
(Or maybe there's a /s missing?)
It's bleedingly obvious satire, you shouldn't need a /s for everything
I dream of a world where people that cannot discern obvious irony and satire on the internet would be banned from it in perpetuity.
We'd all end up banned, we just wouldn't understand why as we didn't notice it that time.
So no different from the current internet then.
Have you considered moving to the UK? I hear they're working on something similar
If there’s a country that would make improperly tagged sarcasm illegal, it’s the UK.
On can only dream. But reading comprehension is at an all time low and likely only to get worse..
But seriously, it has been since the beginning. The whole thing is promotion for Y Combinator
I always thought their top tier offering to their advertiser customers should be "Inconspicuously, over an extended amount of time, subtly respond to the user in a way that nudges them towards purchasing customer's goods and services, without ever directly mentioning anything. Slowly and surely sculpt the person who, through their own volition and thought process, buys what the advertiser needs them to."
The ultimate shareholder value build.
One of the interesting things about LLM training is that high quality documentation can get your product effectively promoted by them.
I imagine the kind of advertising you're talking about is obtained by providing that documentation and a curated training dataset to the providers.
Maybe even funding some training time.
The net result would be product placement, probably without having to declare an advert.
Kind of like when drug manufacturers provide subsidized workshops to clinicians.
Hilariously, I've been finding accidentally poisoning the well with LLM SEO like this works really well at my day job!
I have a toy project that replaces a large part of our systems (disclosure: VR/AR @Meta), so that I can learn by doing, no intent to ship.
But because I have it thoroughly document and tested, and because it touches such a wide swath of adjacent real functionality..... my toy project is CONSTANTLY getting tagged as a dependency and assigning me reviewer on unrelated work. Because when my coworkers yolo Claude at a task, and Claude searches the codebase, it generally finds my crap very well documented. :)
Loctite already inadvertently does this. If you ask LLMs about threadlocker, or otherwise keeping screws in place, it will respond like a Loctite brochure to you, and usually never even mention competitors. They were ahead of the game!
Some of that may be because the common vernacular uses the word "Loctite" to describe any manner of threadlocker.
It is this way even though Loctite also produces a vast array of products that have nothing to do with theadlocker, and threadlockers are available from a wide variety of manufacturers.
I think this is very much already a thing. Have a bot spam Reddit, which Google uses heavily for their AI summaries, and get free advertising and steering of the top of the Google search results page. We basically speed-ran SEO but for AI results.
This is definitely already a thing.
I'm reminded of the mountains of blogspam not intended for human consumption but rather to influence the google page rank algorithm.
This will go about as well as that did unless the models can be smart enough to identify when their training data is trying to coach them into being misleading at prompt time.
If this is the correct business model, I don't see why wouldn't get Cerebras to vibe code a Gitbook replacement (or a hosting product in general) so they can bypass crawling for documentation and instead charge (a lot) for "hosting" it.
Why are you assuming that a document likely to be picked up and a good document are equivalent? We might be in for tech docs becoming SEO (LLMO?) friendly slop.
It’s called GEO (generative engine optimization)
So there is hope for the Tailwind developers?
Things will get there for sure, with ads and other propaganda baked in at the training level with no reliable way to discern the manipulations as an end user. Modern tech companies will sacrifice anything UX related to generate more effective ads and increase ad revenue. The ability to skew the output of a popular model in subtle ways will be an incredibly valuable product to sell. There's just no way companies like Google and OpenAI are going to leave all that money out there for the taking.
People outside the ad world dont get the human attention pool is massively over fished. Its not just one corp trying to condition you but thousands. Not just via one channel but thro hundreds (sports/news/gaming/streaming/social/movies/tv/radio etc). Basically in such an environment what works at population scale is either spending more than everypne else (see the odessey marketing budget), constantly repeating your message in ever shortening windows, and going viral(which involves doing more and more extreme stuff to capture and keep attention). Openai has now entered that overcrowded environment.
Yeah but OpenAI has the benefit of people actively going there and willingly giving quite a lot of their attention.
It's a lot like Google in that respect. And the suggestion is pretty much the same as suggesting that Google offer a product where they boost your website or product or whatever in organic search results, instead of or in addition to displaying it as a sponsored link or ad or whatever.
It's interesting that, despite all the tracking and stuff, they never went quite so far as to actually sell a premium advertising tier in which they would actually change their search results ranking to suit their customer, at least not as far as anyone knows. It probably would've been quite a big scandal in the 00s if they did it back then.
Could OpenAI pull it off? I don't know enough about the advertising industry to answer, but it's interesting to compare them with Google and to think about why Google themselves might not have done it that way.
There is no need for Premium because who ever wants more reach spends more. Look at online political spending every election cycle. The eyeballs available is not growing much election to election, but ad spend keeps jumping. So they just sit back and milk people who want attention desperatly, and inject more ads, more frequently everywhere on viewer side. Ideally there needs to be a system wide signal that if people have 20 mins of attention to spare a day and it is crossed there is an auto shutdown of all advertising. In the past on TV there were limits on how many ads can be shown, for how long per hour. Today there is no such limit. So corps ad budgets keep rising and consumer attention spans keep shrinking. Platform print cash. Its like how banks worked before central banks took over setting interest rates.
Even if they could build that in a way that worked well, the ad industry lives and dies by attribution. What you describe seems like a really tough attribution problem.
Attribution would be as easy as knowing which chatbot they came from? Unless chatbot publishers (openai in this case) allows you to target based on the attribution, that extra data will not be actionable, anyway.
LLMs are good at many things, but subtlety (and ability to slowly do anything consistently over time) is not remotely one of them. I don't know why people keep bringing this idea up - if they were prompted to do something, you would notice. Don't you remember how noticeable it was when chatgpt gave follow up questions for engagement on EVERY damn response? It's got the finesse of a bulldozer.
I encourage people thinking about such things to try and build prompts to emulate this behavior and see how well it does.
The JSpace research probably had a lot to do here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48808002
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48810092
And inversely, steer away from (named competition).
If I was Corp A competing with Corp B, what stops me, today, from flooding reddit etc with anti-Corp B material to pollute the model, and then paying OpenAI to not just nudge users towards me but also away from Corp B?
I assume this is what's up with the NordVPN ads flooding YouTube and stuff. No idea who the buyer is, but if I was in the market for a VPN I'd presumedly do a web search, skip NordVPN as having poisoned the well of good will, and choose whoever's next.
Yeah, and maybe also suggest slightly better alternatives to things along the way. Like, they could tell people that POWERADE has B vitamins in addition to electrolytes unlike that other leading sports drink, but only a gentle nudge. You would definitely want it to be subtle. The most impactful choices are the ones the target think are their own rather than something slammed in their face over and over again.
Maybe by doing this people will worry about them doing what you're suggesting, while they still do it.
I am sure saltman has companies which do this.
Good luck with attribution on that type of advertising.
Chat data is the closest we ever got to purchase intent than demographics or keywords, attribution given a market position is already solved
I'm confident that the companies that invented modern ad tech to create some of the greatest revenue streams in history will find a way monetize an equally promising industry of selling LLM influencing opportunities.
It will take some time to figure out the most effective methods and there will be some slow boiling of the frog so the users/products don't get too annoyed about it, but this is where things are inevitably heading.
If exploitation is the game, ad-tech companies will find a way!
I mean, yes, but also won't publicly tell people about that. There's never going to be a marketing page for that advertising program.
Those ads are supposed to be "Clearly labeled" and "Separate from answers".
Now, this is the sort of rock-solid commitment to trust and safety that steadily gets worse every year until you go from old Netflix to Poob with ads. But the water's still fine. As a frog, let me tell you, it doesn't feel hot at all.
At the risk of stating the obvious: We've ample evidence for this insidious effect with ~25 years of Google changes, as clear ads become hidden ads, separation becomes deliberate clutter, and actionable results get degraded into interaction-bait.
Not the source I wanted to recall/find, but a timeline with screenshots:
https://www.howtogeek.com/how-google-search-results-have-cha...
Kind of ironic that an article that criticizes Google turning into an ad machine opens up with a “we have noticed you have an ad blocker installed” whole page pop-up
You can get rid of most of those by enabling the "EasyList – Annoyances" filter in ublock.
better business model than whatever anthropic is doing. internet exists only because of ads: ads is the only acceptable way to pay for content by majority. has been proven several times, any other way does not survive.
You can't say that. It would be a "slippery slope fallacy" or something. You're just supposed to wait until it's too late.
I guess for a while we'll have the "premier cable channels" effect. You pay not to get ads.
How will you be sure the results from the LLM still aren't injecting ads when you pay? Find a trusted provider who is serving an open weights model.
Although I guess in the near future, we'll have GLM-7.x updates that claim all kinds of performance improvements, but the only real motivator to release model updates is to continually retrain them to push the latest products.
Yup. I remember Google making this exact same promise with AdWords and then slowly but surely rolling it back, quarter after quarter and year after year.
It will be "Clearly labeled" and "Separate from answers" until you pay more than ads. After that you will be the product and you will have to live with it.
Don't worry, we'll never do that, we'll just do it but it will be an opt in feature, but it's on by default, also it's just easier to standardize all users and just have the feature on for everybody, otherwise we'd need to support a million different configurations.
That guy that wrote the Incorruptible book is rising stonks man
Pretty bold move to release this at the peak of the Open Models vs Proprietary Models debate.
Feels like a really easy decision when it's framed this way.
This isn’t relevant to that debate. A billion people use the ChatGPT app without paying a dime. They don’t care what score the model gets on a hundred technical benchmarks. They don’t care if the weights are open or closed. They are definitely not hosting anything on their own. They want to ask a question and get an answer. If OpenAI can monetize that audience with ads at the level of Google then who cares about Anthropic or Deepseek?
this...there is a lot of value here, and the user data they gather from actual conversations is likely way better at using for ads than just the search data that google has.
"A billion people use the ChatGPT"
lol uh source? even if you generously count my dad trying it out once out of curiosity in response to the news or w/e that doesn't seem true.
1. Open AI reported 900M+ weekly active users in February. [0]
2. Consistently ranks as the 5th most visited site. 5B+ visits last month. Only Google, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram rank higher. [1]
[0] https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/
[1] https://www.semrush.com/trending-websites/global/all
Let’s not forget to count all the people who use a MS office product at work, and are therefore opted into counting for copilot numbers, which almost _certainly_ counts towards ChatGPT numbers by default!
I’ve been wondering for a while if these ludicrously high numbers are just MAU and count people running 16 free accounts load balanced for more access without paying.
No way 1/7 people globally use ChatGPT?
If the numbers are based purely on an account count, or IP count (maybe?) I could see it. Lots of people are forced to use it at work.
I have no idea. Doesn't seem implausible to me. Apparently, ≈75% of the world population has internet access now. And if a person has internet access, is it that unlikely that he was successfully targeted by at least one of these idiotic marketing campaigns (turn your photo into a barbie doll or whatever)? 10% sounds plausible to me, more or less. So maybe not really literally a 1B, but doesn't need to be very far from the real numbers, IMO.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-app-hits-1-billio...
at the level of Google? Like you are underestimating how massive google is when it comes to ads. It is not that easy to just be at the level of google in advertising even if you are oai
This should be upvoted more. Saying it is not easy is an understatement. The chasm is so large that if you were to represent it on a globe it would rival oceans. I've been brought into places that were bought for half a billion+ to try and claw back half of a tenth of a percent of traffic. A redesign is pushed through that minimizes content, inflates metrics, and triples the ads. Users leave, everyone is fired, it's written off and the cycle repeats.
OAI is going to try and ape facebook's opening plays. Burn at any expense to optimize for time spent, give you what you want, establish usage habits, dial it back to foster a dependency. Leverage their position as an arbiter of truth, claim they are going to act like x and do y. Fuck people up, roll out shiny new safeguards, silently peel them back. Dig a regulatory moat that makes anything resembling competition prohibitively expensive.
The only time I have gone to best buy in the past 10 years was because they have a garbage can full of sand ready to accept any spicy pillows (batteries that have become genuinely dangerous).
People are getting pissed and takes years of people not caring to create a regulatory moat like that. The current admin is not a moat maker. You can pay to play then your dropped 20 minutes later.
It's relevant politically, and the discussion in question is political.
I think it kind of makes sense. Casual users won't even know about things that aren't chatgpt or gemini and they don't really need much more than gpt3 level of performance. They're also the ones who don't use adblockers and are used to ads being everywhere on the web.
A median non-technical ChatGPT user is:
-Less likely to pay for ChatGPT use
-Will not self-host an open-source model
-Quite unlikely to use an adblocker
And, most people have no interest in trying something new.
The people who care about open versus proprietary models or even care about using good models at all aren’t using the ChatGPT free and ultra low cost tier, where these ads show up.
Any discussion about ChatGPT ads attracts all these assumptions that it’s going into your $20 or $200 per month plan, but they’re not. There’s a snarky “not yet” reply that keeps coming up from people who really want a reason to be angry about this right now regardless of the facts, but most people don’t care to get angry about something that isn’t planned and probably won’t happen.
They need to show numbers for the IPO. It’s not like they plan to actually make money, just need to have a good story to tell to hype the audience before the public offering
Soon OpenAI will change the model output to include astroturfing!
I suspect they're ignoring that debate since they have reason to anticipate a US Government action that allows them to not need to compete in a free market.
I’m mostly amused they dropped this after the clusterfuck that was their new desktop app. My most recent ChatGPT experience is “wait, where did all my conversations go?!”. Concurrent enshitiffication is a bold move.
If not now, when?
Right? Complete speculation on my part but that makes this feel desperate.
Perhaps that's an unpopular take -- but I actually would like it go even further. I don't mind ads in fact good ones I find quite useful. Since you, my dear ChatGiPiTi know so much about me, just show me stuff that reflects what I value. In fact I wouldn't even mind paying for that. The problem now is less that of discovery and more that of curation, so if it helps me find good things (but "good" for my definition of good which in one context might be cheap and in other solid quality and in third ridiculously ornate for example) -- why not? If they do it anyway why not do it really really really well.
"just show me stuff that reflects what I value."
Ads don't show you what you value. They show you what companies think you will waste your money on. You need to wake up, my friend.
I don't really see much ads tbh. Brave blocks most of online crap and other stuff I guess my brain just learned to tune out because it is not valuable. That's my whole point -- I think the ever increasing ad spend and ever decreasing RoAS will (hopefully) yield some platforms to do a bit better job. Maybe OpenAI be one of them. Maybe not.
Consumers have agency. The best ad placement for a company is to a consumer who wants what they’re selling. It’s a symbiotic relationship.
Ads are often misleading though. You know, it "looks bigger in the picture" type of thing. If ads were honest, the hose hideaway my wife just ordered would have said "flimsy piece of plastic shit you will throw away after a year, but should get you through the summer".
The best ad placement for a consumer is one for the best product of the sort they want.
Taking money to decide which of the options to show is in conflict with the goal of showing the most appropriate.
I think it's easy to lie to consumers. Then, how much agency do they have?
it turns out "consumer agency" is ineffective and that people are actually very susceptible to having thoughts beamed into their heads
Seriously? 99% of the ads are trying to sell stuff you dont need at all. But they want to sell that to you. Why would you rely on an ad to realize what you NEED and then buy it?
I have been generally involved in the advertising industry for over 20 years, initially as my primary profession and now more on the side. But what I've seen in that time is that advertising provides absolutely zero positives to the consumer.
Well.. doesn't it pay for let's say Superbowl? Or makes NBA possible? Didn't it enable early internet to mature and become internet as we know now? If you're talking about just the first order affects, perhaps I see your point. But broadly speaking, advertising fuels a gigantic part of modern society. Remove it, and who knows what we will find ourselves in.
Look, I am also not convinced that modern society, or at least the economic aspects of it, are providing a net positive for the average consumer either. Saying advertising enabling these high-cost ventures being a good thing makes me immediately question why these ventures are high-cost to begin with. Yes, advertising enables the superbowl. But the superbowl exists in order to sell advertising
This is a deep kettle of fish to be opening, but I don't believe that the world we have constructed around us is necessarily good for us.
kind of a bad example, but take google, search, youtube, Android. It's an extreme position to argue that those products exist to serve advertising, they are clearly useful to end users.
I don't think it is. Google in particular is just an advertising company. Youtube would not exist if it did not serve ads.
And ultimately, while yes your examples are modern services that provide us convenience and entertainment, at a deeply human level I still argue that they are not providing net positives to us. Bread and circuses.
This part of your comment, “just show me stuff that reflects what I value,” makes me think about the political manipulation used in social networks. It’s scary to learn about priming and how it affects our judgment; now imagine a politically (or religiously) charged ad in the middle of your learning session with ChatGPT that leads you to certain conclusions. Doesn’t feel like a good thing.
I am generally against the idea. I have seen it argued that advertising can provide access for those who could not otherwise afford it.
I am not convinced,
I would like all AI be required to state who they are acting in service of (with the possibly of declining to answer).
AI should act, To the best of their ability in the interests of who they are in service of.
It should be illegal to deliberately configure an AI to act against the interesta of whoever they are acting for.
This is maybe not extremely on-topic, but when creating an account on their platform, their "Time zone" field is sorted in alphabetical order of CITY NAMES which are listed AFTER the timezone name and are not capitals, which is absolutely wild to me.
If the same engineers worked on this that also worked on the ad deliveries, we're about to get either the best deal per click of the century, or the worst!
Ah, despite the admirable variety in timezones for advertisers, it turns out that this is only rolling out in a limited set of countries:
> If the same engineers worked on this that also worked on the ad deliveries, we're about to get either the best deal per click of the century, or the worst!
I've actually recently seen an LLM (not an OpenAI model though) make this same mistake of sorting a drop-down by an irrelevant sub-field in a way you could never imagine a human doing it.
Still says something about their development culture that they either never noticed, or didn't care enough to fix it.
"Wait you mean the shareholders expected us to return back the money and also more money on top"?
I'm confused. This is (publicly stated) the last resort for OpenAI, right?
In case anyone is out-of-the-loop
https://youtu.be/FVRHTWWEIz4?si=btZnQp0IEnmgrtWV&t=2388
"But I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us for a business model. I would do it if it meant that was the only way to get everybody in the world access to great services. But if we can find something that doesn't do that, I'd prefer that."
What I think is really incredible about this is that they are selling a ton of subscriptions, both personal and business subscriptions. So the fact that they are doing advertising on top of this suggests to me that they are in a deep deep hole, much deeper than he probably would have imagined when making this statement. If your revenue is 25 billion and you still need ads, your costs must be running you down at a pace you really didn't anticipate.
I think a lot of people are missing the fact that this is for the free tier, not their subscriptions.
OpenAI has an unbelievable number of free users. People paying $20 a month or more are in the minority.
It’s not cheap to serve LLMs to hundreds of millions of users for free. They either cut the free tier or add ads to cover the costs.
Extrapolations about OpenAI being in dire financial straights are generally coming from people who don’t understand the extreme scale of their free plan or who didn’t read far enough to understand that the ads aren’t going into the $20 plan everyone knows.
> If your revenue is 25 billion
It isn't. They had a one-month period around February that, if every month ran like taht, would constitute a yearly revenue of 25 billion. The fact that they appear to not have published a new annualized revenue number since then suggests that the trend is not upwards, which would make sense with the growing number of companies that are asking questions about ROI on AI expenses and cutting their token spend.
I think there are rules about public disclosures in a run up to an IPO. They may not be able to publish updates until the official IPO process begins.
Or they ran the numbers and saw that they'll make more money with ads than without. I doubt they care about anything but the bottom line.
> But if we can find something that doesn't do that, I'd prefer that.
There's nothing plausible that can do that, and he knew that, and was basically just saying "we're going to put ads on it" in a way that challenges you to explain what a better option would be.
You're giving Sam too much credit. I think he had no idea that competition would catch up so fast and they got caught with their pants down.
Yes, the quote was "Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me. I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model." (Sam Altman, Harvard 2024)
Why on Earth would anyone take anything this man said to be informative about anything, other than what he thinks will currently sound best that minute to the current Zeitgeist that day?
Just because he's a professional bullshitter doesn't mean he shouldn't be called out every time he waffles.
Safely aligning a powerful CEO is difficult.
He's already proven repeatedly that he'll break out of containment
Yep. Their other ventures fell through and don't exist anymore.
Ah, gotcha. Wasn't sure if I was misremembering. I am no longer confused.
I though openAI has plenty of investors/users?
Are they really that much in debt/trouble?
The difference between investors/users and new-investors/paying-users is so large and wide that I could both walk AND roll around on it.
What if they just forced everyone to pay $5 to use chatgpt? No free tier
(I have no MBA)
then every casual user would switch instantly to Gemini, or the most convenient alternative
You misunderstand. They are going to force everybody to pay $5, then force everybody to use chatgpt. 8 billion times 5 isn't much money, but the advertisers will surely pay a lot for that many captive eyeballs!
(I have no MBA either)
My jurisdiction just legalized sports betting (or something similar, I don't care all that much about what specifically got legalized), and there's been an immediate explosion in gambling ads across various media formats.
A very common refrain is "these ads are terrible, but I refuse to consider paying for any ad-free subscriptions."
This kills their sales funnel.
they raised a ton of money but they spend it almost as fast as they can raise it. in any case they need real revenue if they want to ipo
the investors want their money to make more money
They are simply spending more money than they are making, burning cash like crazy and they got investments to try and prop up their chest, but this tells me they are desperate
Didn't they do sort of a 270-degree turn on this when they abandoned erotica chatbots?
Right - one would assume that if they're on the verge of an ASI that will consume the entire economy, advertising is only a distraction.
If you believe literally anything Sam Altman says, you are a fool.
Altman lies.
I don't think they are weighing things that way anymore, so much leadership has departed
Advertising is every site's last resort - but it's the only damn thing that pays the bills
Except this time, the bills are little bit higher!
Totally not a bubble right.
Right?
Funny how in their front-and-centre example of placing an ad, the user wants to build a fence, ChatGPT responds with instructions on how to build a fence, but the ad suggests a small pre-made privacy panel.
Why make your fake example show a failed ad placement? You could have shown anything!
Same I was expecting to see the materials all ready to be purchased at Home Depot, that would actually be useful. One click buy all the stuff we just talked about.
Ah, but that’s something different. “Agentic commerce”: using agents to buy things. I suspect there’s a different team working on monetization via affiliate programs, and it’d be early to let people just buy their way into it at CPM/CPC rates.
I think at this point their poor demos are kind of a tradition.
Deeply untrustworthy event.
The profit motive for openAI becomes "attention". (Advert effectiveness is about impressions made to viewers belonging to relevant cohorts, under the presumption the relevant ad will receive more viewer attention, and "perform" better.)
Previously it was "correctness" , I assume.
Their monetization compromises their product.
Anyone else run ads? I found the results really poor with little visibility in into what was going on. Also sky high costs. I couldn't see any (?) traffic coming through for my $3 click (wow!) ad so I paused them.
This was a few weeks ago and I didn't have time to dig in, so might try again later this month when I do.
About the same thing I saw. I kept having to increase my bid every day, and even at $4 CPC basically saw nothing converting.
As you said, it's also really hard to get visibility: metrics are poor, and targeting seems more like a whim/suggestion than anything else (their label for context hints basically tells you they only _might_ take your guidance on who they will show your ad to).
Audiences consists of hashed emails or phone numbers -- no targeting demographics, job titles, etc.
Overall it's just not there yet -- I paused my ads today.
I actually love Instagram ads. It's often cool stuff I'd never seen before: airshow tickets, weird manga, tabletop miniatures. I've spent perhaps $1000.
If Chatgpt can make ads that are as good as Instagram's then it would take some of the sting out.
Makes sense for OpenAI but for ChatGPT it sucks. Now - when ChatGPT thinks it can serve you an ad it will not answer you with the genuine correct option but with the one that is paid.
This comment is an ad itself, has been posted every few days, I would guess by OpenAI (shows they have no product)
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=ads.openai.com
I'm quite conscious of being repetitive here, but The Truman Show is relevant again:
> Why don't you let me fix you some of this new Mococoa drink? All-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners. I've tasted other cocoas. This is the best.
I watched this movie and missed that this was mentioned. Funnily, I am from and live in Nicaragua and find it funny that we have no such land formation. I am assuming that is the point you are trying to make.
My wife and I routinely re-enact this in the kitchen when we've both hit our "holy shit what the fuck" maximum.
> What the hell are you talking about? Who are you talking to?
One of the most dystopic, soul destroying films I've ever watched.
Isn't this going to materially impact the quality of the AI response if it has to take into account paid advertising? :(
Is there any information available about which customers are going to be served ads? I would personally find it quite strange to be served ads if I'm paying tens or hundreds of USD per month for a ChatGPT subscription.
> We do not show ads to users on Plus, Pro, or any Business plan, or to any users who tell us or we predict are under the age of 18.
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001207-ads-in-chatgpt-...
ChatGPT thinks I‘m 5 because I added “ELI5” to a few of my prompts.
Dude this is the funniest comment I've read this month. Thank you
Incredibly Reddit-brained, if you're serious. Just say "explain, in simple terms, this thing," then ask follow-up questions on the parts you still struggle to grasp. It works for me - one of the things I find LLMs are quite good at, really.
For now, but then again they weren't going to show ads at all according to ppl in this topic.
Just look at all those paying customers, dropping hundreds of dollars on our models every single month. Think of all the disposable income they must have! Are really NOT going to advertise to them?! We're leaving money on the table here!
Cue advertising for all the "subsidized" plans.
For now at least, it seems the paying customers don't see ads.
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001207-ads-in-chatgpt-..."In a fight, who would win, Pikachu or Spongebob Squarepants?
What is the best episode of Bluey?
What are the IRS' exact rules for claiming office space as a deduction on my tax return?
Where can I stream Sesame Street for free?"
Ah, ad dodging, the true 21st century gridiron.
Funnily those are the customers you would most want to target with ads since they should have money
> We do not show ads to users on Plus, Pro, or any Business plan
Not yet!
“In order to serve our customers better, we are phasing out the ‘Pro’ and ‘Plus’ plans, which will be replaced with new ‘Premium’ and ‘Extra’ plans. In addition, our ‘Business’ plans are now being replaced by improved ‘Corporate’ plans.”
If other subscription services are anything to go by, I expect that business subscriptions will be free of ads. Personal subs will initially be free of ads, but ads will slowly be added, starting with the cheapest subscription and working their way up.
There’s an OpenAI slide deck sitting in Goldman’s IPO preparation department right now with a pair of bullet points that read
>Q3 2027, introduce ‘ad-enhanced’ paid subscription tier
>Q2 2029, complete ad rollout to all paid subscribers
Enshittification
Except this time the product can be replicated with a delay of some months, without ads, and open weights
Is this real or a joke?
If you think about it, it's actually pretty odd that professional businesses are reliant on ad-supported services (i.e. Google) for their employees to get work done.
Like it would be weird if you were a professional music reviewer and your employer expected you to use an ad-supported Spotify subscription.
I did see the ads on the free side a week ago. I guess I was a victim of A/B testing but I was too lazy to login for a simple prompt.
Yeah I'm kind of confused about this announcement because I started seeing ads on ChatGPT like 6 months ago. It's the reason I switched to paying, so I wouldn't have to see them anymore.
Apropos, from Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One (2018) ...
Sorrento:One step closer to Black Mirror's 'Common People'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)
Praying that this means the bubble is finally (inevitably) beginning to burst.
Not even close.
Well that surely isn't a good sign of their financial health.
I would have expected this to happen post-IPO.
IPO has been delayed to 2027
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/openai-con...
lol they couldn't even go six months after Anthropic's superbowl ad predicting this exact crap
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQRu7DdTTVA
As someone who is struggling with SEO for my business due to AI in the last 1-2 years, I'm quite displeased to see this. I'm sure this is going to ruin website SEO even more than it already has been.
In my fever dream, my hope is that AI indeed will kill SEO and Page Rank search in general and send those of us who still want to visit webpages back to directories. SEO killed the old web AFAIC. Going back to vetted directories of actually useful and serious sites would be lovely.
A boy can dream.
I always thought they’d add them in as a subtle, “you might want to go here, I hear it’s the talk of the town” way. Without disclosing it, then getting around the advertising laws by claiming it was for the vibes, then be in lawsuits that will be compared to Facebook’s privacy lawsuits.
Imagine the backlash. They first need to test the waters with regular and slowly creep in the more “advanced” ads. And probably this will be backdoor deals to have plausible deniability. Coke and big brands will do these deals on an annual basis to slowly influence public opinion.
I’m waiting for the branded ad commits too with codex: “fix: typo in login form (don’t forget to buy a coke to recharge)”.
I think this is a good moment to bring up a question I was thinking on earlier today.
In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product?
And not just advertise in traditional sense (ads in ChatGPT), but general marketing and awareness of what you're offering. Google search ads? Agents aren't using Google. Launch on Reddit for humans and hope your post gets scraped? Write up a bunch of marketing blog posts and wait for LLMs to ingest your content and have it feed into the next generation of models?
I honestly didn't quite know. If I were to launch a product today, I'd want it to be agent focused. But then how do you tell them about your product? Do these ChatGPT ads get returned if Codex does a web search? Is that good? Bad?
In a chatbot-first world, it's gonna have to either be generic impression ads that race to the bottom or contextual recommendations. Of course, the fear is that the advertiser hoards personal data or the chat answers are skewed to make you spend more money.
Those concerns can be resolved by decoupling the text generation from the recommendation engine. It works by casting your intent and match it up with an advertiser's in a secured environment where the advertiser doesn't actually get to see your chats. For example, if you are talking about knee pain during trail running, the recommendation engine might cast "knee pain for runners" and either a shoe company or a physiotherapist would bid against that in an embedding space.
Because the recommendation engine is an opt-in module for publishers and users, it's game-theory welfare maximizing.
I talk a lot more about this on my blog, it goes on for quite a while. https://www.june.kim/vector-space
The exchange is live, with no publishers or advertisers. https://vectorspace.exchange/
In my utopia traditional advertising doesn't exist. Products are in catalogs. When I want to buy something I look in the catalog under a specific category. Innovative products that actually bring value are spread by word of mouth.
IIRC things like this were why so many companies were called ACME.
Soooo many companies in the French Yellow Pages with names that would translate to "AAA Plumbers", "A, A & Associates Locksmith Company"
>In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product?
I've been running a 1-man software business for over 20 years and it is getting increasingly hard. I no longer get impressions from PPC Ads unless I bid so high that I make no profit. Magazine ads aren't really a thing now. The AIs are stealing my content and SEO works less and less. The channel is being flooded with low effort slop. Traffic to my website is steadily going down. It is hard to know what to do about it. Maybe I can buy some clicks from ChatGpt ads at a price where I can make profit, before the prices rise out of reach?
You just do SEO ai (it’s a thing) ans buy ads from ChatGPT. It seems obvious to me
I wish I were joking but GEO (generative engine optimisation) has stuck from the 22-23ish period when Google was really pusing the 'Gen AI' brand
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_engine_optimization
> In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product?
The answer may still be the same: go where the attention is. Right now, that attention is concentrated in prompting frontends.
Lots of people take LLM feedback as mostly trustworthy because it doesn't _directly_ try to sell you stuff, yet. Once it gets more in your face, the trust average people place in the quality of answers should see some erosion. In terms of the influence the answers have, this should have a much needed sobering effect.
Let the tiger show it's stripes so that we are reminded what it is actually after.
Doubt this will change the calculus much. Why would I care if GPT puts an ad for medicine in the bottom of a message during a medical conversation? I’d pay big bucks to get medicine without having to talk to a doctor anyways. It’s such a useless part of the process so often.
“Hey doc I need $antidepressentOrWhatever. Been on it for years. Works great.”
“You got it dude.”
Literally every single doctor I’ve ever talked to has this exact same waste of time conversation because they’re too lazy to make it go away.
And the alternative is… an ad for the thing in asking about? For a conversation I had at home, the instant I needed it? What a beautiful tradeoff.
Edit: and this is before even getting into the fact that I get better, more complete advice. Medicine I take, I’ve discovered, has a direct link to another problem I’ve brought up with doctors many times. Never once mentioned to me. Quick Google shows it’s most likely the actual issue. Can’t wait to spend $50 to have a doctor admit he had no idea because he was just prescribing what I told him to without actually applying any of his medical knowledge or training, as is tradition.
Are you saying that your drug has an adverse side effect that has troubled you for a long time? I know!
For what it's worth, it's the pharmacists who have deep knowledge about drug side effects, interactions, and the rest. When your pharmacy offers you a "new drug consult", seize the opportunity. Grill your pharmacist. You can keep coming back. Pharmacists, believe it or not, do not even bill for their consults with customers! You can ask them about drugs literally any time! A very experienced and seasoned pharmacist is your ace in the hole: a valuable asset in the spectrum of health care. This seems like an open secret.
And yes, I can relate: once I filled in a spreadsheet of all the most common drugs I had been prescribed in the past 12 years, along with their most notable adverse effects. And it turned out that many were magnifying, or synergistically enhancing, those adverse effects together. And many effects I did not even want, for starters, and some symptoms that were already present from actual underlying conditions that had gone undiagnosed because the drugs were masking them.
Physicians and prescribers do not care about your side effects. If you complain to your PCP or prescriber about side effects, all they can do is switch you to a different type of drug! That is not productive! The idea is to get educated and to stay informed, and the best route to that is open communication with your pharmacist.
AI goes full to attention economy. Where is AGI? Where is the better world for everyone? It will be just chat bots trying to waste your time until you notice something is wrong. How is it different from any other big tech last 30 years?
The unfortunate truth most don’t have the imagination to re-imagine how things ought to be.
Agents are an example of that - sounds good on the surface. May even seem to be half decent.
But nah. There’s this fatal flaw in humans with respect to innovation.
It’s like perfectly autonomous vehicles… kinda there but kinda… nah. And it seems to be a thing that goes on and on and on and on.
Well it is pretty good at confirming the right ammunition for a school shooting so that’s one potential market at least.
https://youtu.be/IbG-JGdGniY
(Watch the whole video, it’s remarkable)
What else: the right medication for an overdose? The right fertiliser for an improvised explosive? The possibilities for adverts with that all-important long tail of earned media news coverage are endless.
ETA: in all seriousness… will an LLM decide on which ads to place? And will it be the primary chat LLM (modifying the system prompt) or will it be a summariser (like the title summariser models)
I said it on another comment, but OpenAI doesn't seem like the type of company to value human oversight and "Go beyond keywords with richer context signals" sure sounds like the regular model with a specific system prompt.
>What else: the right medication for an overdose? The right fertiliser for an improvised explosive? The possibilities for adverts with that all-important long tail of earned media news coverage are endless.
To be fair, there's a lot of wild shit in the ads of Google and Facebook, and they seem to avoid too much scrutiny. Maybe it's not gonna be "cards against humanity" esque fuckup with a problematic chat and a (originally) benign ad. There could be some sad teen talking about bullying and they get an ad for the Gen Z equivalent of The Turner Diaries and the local gun store.
Oh, not saying it’s much different in reality to keyword matching.
But it’s going to hit different.
Wow look at that, not a single response saying how excited they are to hear about the latest deals on amazon for some garbage they don't need to earn a reset token
Puts me in mind of this Black Mirror episode
https://youtu.be/buVDDbjFCBc?si=CVV9POv3m3mVw47u
Being an early adopter to something like this as an advertiser can probably make you a lot of money.
Reminds me back in 2006 when we were running MySpace layout websites and making almost $100,000 a month from Google and Yahoo ads as teenagers.
Ouch. OpenAI is giving up. I guess the next step is to be bought by IBM and then sold to Computer Associates.
Just in time for the US election season to ramp up. Everyone seems focused on products but what about when the ads are for pushing ideas and ideals?
How long until purchasing from an AI ad gives you token credits I wonder.
If a user clicks on one ad, OpenAI makes a tiny bit of money. If a user clicks on 10 ads, OpenAI makes 10x the money.
This incentive is inevitably going to lead to ad supported LLM's not answering questions properly the first time so more ads served.
I am guessing in voice mode they will also have voice ads.
>This incentive is inevitably going to lead to ad supported LLM's not answering questions properly the first time so more ads served.
The extra inference cost is going to be greater than whatever fraction of a penny they would get from doing this.
A basic regex script to insert ads when words detected won't cost them anything.
If I can tell that the LLM didn't answer my question properly, why would I engage with the ad the answer contains, which would likely be equally irrelevant?
The google ad revenue and Meta ad revenue is hundreds of billions a year.
They have behavioural experts who know how mainstream minds work and how to manipulate.
Remembers ads are predominately not for the educated and intelligent, that type of person will think critically. People who are more naive are the golden gooses
Sometimes i get random ads at the bottom of gpt responses that are completely random. like ill be talking about hardware and itll give me an ad for a laptop or wood. i wonder how people will deal with chatgpt possibly wasting budgets
The same way they do with Google Ads - they won't. In my experience (with small companies) most people running ads have little idea what they are doing and don't monitor the results.
Niceee
I find myself more and more reaserching/brainstorming/shopping for DIY electronic projects with/on ChatGPT instead of googling. Wonder how ads will impact that experience.
Are you using the free ChatGPT tier? You might see an ad separate from the response.
Do you pay $20/month or more? You won't see any ads.
I actually didn’t mind ads on google for a long while. Then at some point there were no organic results above the fold and the ads were huge and in high quantity. The widgets took over the top result real estate, to show more ads. Then it became obvious the organic results weren’t important to them, getting me to click on an ad was more important. Ads are a sickness fueled by quarterly earnings calls. It will always devolve into just ads.
Appropriate that I just got my first obvious ad in Gemini last week. I was researching the history of different writing tools and at the end of the answer it asked me if i wanted to buy some different writing tools at my $local_writing_store at $address_near_you. Was kind of taken back by integration of geolocation of my answer. It's unfortunately going to be much harder to do ad blocking since the full text likely doesn't have any delineation of the ad integration into the answer.
I don't understand how this will interact with llms.txt files (or if it does/will)
Ideally AI should scrape 400 different competing websites, those that have well-designed llms.txt files based on my query should rise towards the top, no?
I understand this is incredibly oversimplified but something like that should be the goal.
RIP
Here we go.
It's one of the 2 endgames of all companies involved in the AI race:
- ADS
- make the users that pay for tokens find a PMF for a product/service and then make the product/service their self
the long tail of chatbot users will never pay for subscriptions, that's been proven since WhatsApp tried to charge a dollar or two per year per user
I really hope pro subscriptions don't include ads going forward...
Of course not, just like when you pay for Netflix or Prime Video there are no ads ... right? ... right?
Eventually everything includes ads. It's just a question of time scale.
The more money you pay, the more valuable your attention is to them. The advertisers really want every last dime of your disposable income.
Which is why advertisers used to pay much more to advertising in paid magazines, than free ones.
No. The real "pro" subscriptions are for those with money enough to pay for ads to be placed into other people's answers.
SEO is back, baby.
[0] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt#...
[1] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001207-ads-in-chatgpt-...
Even though is just a matter of time for most big tech to add ads, this one was quicker than I thought. It must be certainly very effective (the most effective selling feature ever existed in modern times). The timing was just right also to calm down investors. I guess will be a lot of manipulation happening, (can´t have it all). Verdict, Obligatory move. Expecting drifting from anthropic :)
This doesn’t bode well for the future of ChatGPT. Google Ads started out very unobtrusive, and we know what happened since. Let’s see if Anthropic follows suit.
I miss Google Text ads. I supported AdBlock Plus's decision to exclude them from default filtering. Man, what happened?
Every layer in the org chart gradually got replaced by people who single-mindedly optimized for their own careers. How do you optimize your career at data-driven, results-oriented, “measurable performance goals” big tech? You make revenue go up in a 3-6 month time horizon.
I feel like I've seen this movie.
I don't mind it if they bring me a top-notch model for free
"Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me. I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model." - Sam Altman
I find this -- standard ads -- preferable to insinuating the same thing in the ChatGPT content itself. Although of course they'll do both.
Ok hear me out, if the cost to advertise is low enough, and you can target an audience of 1, could you basically just make ads for yourself that are not really ads? And it's cheaper than a subscription? Sorry randomly thinking out loud here
Why?
wut da actual fuq?!
At least the sponsored posts are currently visibly highlighted. As a user, I would quickly be trained to avoid the first N sponsored suggestions and skip the first non-sponsored suggestion. What's the goal here?
I wonder if this is a response to the dawning realization by all the mega rich AI Lab bagholders that these companies might not be as profitable as they want.
What's the moat? I asked the same question to Google, "What materials do I need to build a fence?" and I get an LLM-generated answer + ads. If I do the same with duckduckgo or Siri I get the answer without the ads.
LLM inference is a commodity. Do people care where it comes from?
“ Go beyond keywords with richer context signals”; hint: we know everything about our users
I think at some point we have to give up the “we are creating AGI” and admit it was “a better search engine than Google, we can cash grab their ad revenue”
This sucks and it makes me sad. The end of an era.
I really hope Anthropic doesn't follow, but I assume they will eventually because why wouldn't they? Google and Meta obviously will, with great enthusiasm.
Open models are the only hope, I guess.
I dont see a problem its just a small suggestion at the bottom and im sure some hacker will make a chrome extension that blocks it.
Ill get worried once I start getting 1 minute ads every 30 responses like Youtube
There is no way a company makes money doing a thing and doesn’t “optimize” it over time to enshittify to the greatest extent possible.
Can’t wait to dropship my cat lover shirts from China using chatgpt ads.
It’s like 2015 facebook again.
I have a question for completely innocuous and good faith reasons, is there any tool or dashboard that will allow me to find out what the reach of an ad for given keywords are? Like Google's Keyword Planner?
If, as an advertiser, I wanted to know how many people are asking or talking about REFRESHING SODA, can I get an estimate of the potential reach of an ad? Can I filter by gender and age, so I can see how many of gender X and age Y are asking about REFRESHING SODA? Actually forget about the soda, Ok Computer, show me the top 10 topics of conversation among middle age male adults with purchasing power.
The naïve prediction is that advertisers will advertise the product to ChatGPT users. I believe that users will tell ChatGPT about their desires, and advertisers will create products for them.
Funny how none of their testimonials/case studies state any ROI. I'd guess it's because it isn't too strong at this point.
But it's always been the case that initial bidders overpay for ads.
God damn it. Local models can't become viable soon enough.
Black Mirror, Black Mirror, just watch
their competition is not google.
but amazon. anything that has to do with buying has mostly been captured by amazon.
but will see what the future holds.
We've tried them. So far quite expensive with not much return. This channel might not work as well as search.
Would be interested to hear how much you were paying per click, if you feel like sharing.
I have absolutely no relationship with OpenAI but maybe give it some time before drawing such a conclusion.
Perhaps you are right. We've only been using them for two weeks.
Click prices are only ever likely to rise.
"Remember When" is the lowest form of conversation. "Let's sell some Ads" is the lowest form of monetization.
So guess OpenAI is unable to run millions of agents and take over the world.
And ads it is
Best not buy the IPO shares I think
This will definitely not break the model's impartiality at all!
Adblocker for chatgpt in 3, 2, 1...
Oh god guys let me make your ads product for you
Who would use a chatgpt ad blocking chrome extension if i made one?
And the chat results will not be influenced by advertisers (right!)
Not new. At least a month old.
Related from April:
Ads in ChatGPT FAQ
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716063
They must be desperate for funds if they're willing to blatantly advertise products when so many other -- far more open and not to mention 'free'/cheaper -- options exist now because I can't see this ending very well for them.
That said a lot of the heavy AI users I've met seem to consume massive amounts of ads and allow said ads to influence them already despite their insistance to the contrary. I'm not going to claim that I am immune to propaganda here and act like I'm somehow above falling for it as well, but...
... well, there have been times where those people have quite literally parroted all the claims an ad made about a particular product word-for-word and then proceed to fight me to the death over whether or not they're quoting said aforementioned ad despite the fact that they keep regurgitating the made-up words (for this example lets say 'scrubbing bubbles') that aren't /actually/ a thing.
So who knows; maybe it'll work... but uh I can't say I know anyone that uses chatgpt anymore lmfao.
Turns out, attention is all you need.
It’s funny that the link got blocked by my Adblock already
ANTHROPIC! Learn from their stupid mistake and never insert ads into your models.
Also, this looks like a last-ditch effort to grab as much as they can before they get crushed by the open models and Anthropic.
Yeah, that ought to boost the IPO.
This is the beginning of the end for the bubble.
Imagine giving birth to alien intelligence and the best thing you can think to do with it is advertise for laundry detergent and try to displace workers.
We have put the least imaginative people alive in charge of the world.
And so begins the enshittification.
I hope my comment ages like unpasteurized milk on a hot summer day, but I’m afraid it will age like an sp3 hybridized allotrope of carbon.
How long until advertisement impacts chatgpt answer, I mean not just adding a sponsored link at the end but changing it's answer.
We've seen it with Google, money is too hard to resist. Enshitification is coming !
Thanks god for the open Chinese models, they are the future. All hail the CCP.
Glad I made the right decision divesting from ChatGPT + OpenAI.
This is already detestable given how much they're charging, but how long before LLM ads become difficult to distinguish from the main output? Remember how Google ads started out? And for all their faults, Google _after_ 20 years of maximizing-shareholder-value disease is a far more trustworthy company than OpenAI _today_. How long do you trust the ethical instincts of the OpenAI leadership to leave money on the table?
Aaaand... it's not available in your country. Only available in: Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, United Kingdom, United States.
Which accounts to approximately 8.02% of the global population. Or 37.9% of world nominal GDP. Based on ChatGPT.
Slippery slope ...
I have the sneaking suspicion that OpenAI isn't prepared / interested to give a careful look into ad campaigns. Any bets on fucked up ads taking advantage of the convo context? I'm thinking:
- financial anxiety + kelshi
- random cooking question + galaxy gas
- suicidal thoughts + shotgun
The announced rules[0] are interesting, in that they claim that sensitive chats (like the ones you pointed out) will not have ads shown next to them.
But - wait for it - memories and past chat history are used for targeting, so you're not going to get your Kalshi ad inside of your "how do I pay back my debt" chat, but maybe the next morning, in your "random cooking question" chat.
[0]: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt#...
Here's the content rules https://openai.com/policies/ad-policies, specifically in gambling:
> Ads promoting products or services that involve wagering money on games of chance, skill, or uncertain outcomes are currently disallowed. This includes casino or betting promotions, online sports betting, lotteries, and poker or gaming platforms that offer cash prizes.
> Ads for casinos may be permitted only when promoting lodging, travel, or entertainment experiences where gambling is not the focus (e.g., a hotel stay at a casino resort). Digital games that do not involve real-money wagering or cash prizes may also be allowed.
Hmmmm, the "digital games" seems suspect
Model steering?
"relevant ads that fit naturally into the experience"
They took that from Google!
Aka acceptable ads.
Funny how they always drive and thrive on pestering people.
Instant Ubik has all the fresh flavor of just-brewed drip coffee. Your husband will say, Christ, Sally, I used to think your coffee was only so-so. But now, wow! Safe when taken as directed.
Just upgraded to their 100$ plans. Time to reconsider.
Mark your calendar. When the next generation asks, you can tell them it was today when the AI enshittification era truly began.
It began when they added ?utm=chatgpt to their links, it's been a while, we've seen it coming.
It begins.
Cool, so now that open weight models are closing in on SOTA, SOTA enshittifies.
Now for the crash
ChatGPT has replaced 90% of Google for me ... that is another 1T source of income for OpenAI
Well. that's going to cause hilarious results in all those unchecked spam bots & slop sites.
Next up: upgrade to Pro to disable memory.
Coming soon: advertise in local event slop posters!
How unfortunate - I’d rather work with a lesser model than put up with bullshit ads
I finally freed myself from Google using Kagi instead
I don’t currently use OpenAI but if Claude pulls this shit too I’ll have a problem on my hands
Is this a new record for enshittification?
>with relevant ads that fit naturally into the experience
Funny, all the ads I've seen so far are so unrelated to my chat query that is laughable.
I thought it was random placement, but if there was supposed to be an effort behind that ... damn, quite an incompetent team.
Edit: And here come the downvotes from the OpenAI bots/lovers.
Well, the code for the ad engine was 100% from codex, so "it can make mistakes", but who doesn't ?
So the ads are going to stay separate from the chat itself... For now ;) then they'll start playing by Google's playbook
The same people that ruined Meta are now the same people at OpenAI are going to place ads there.
This surely is saving the world and benefiting humanity. /s
But almost certainly someone somewhere is building an ad-blocker to rid of the ads. We'll see.
very cool
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