[khurs]

Open AI attended the annual Cannes Ad Festival this year, alongside the usual Google, Meta etc

They have 900m users and 50m of them are paying.

Ads are inevitable. Surprised they put them on a paid plan user like you, but they are IPO'ing this year and need to show the best numbers possible.

[zb3]

That's some interesting economy there.. 850m users are not paying, so we'll fund the product by displaying advertisements to those users that do not pay.

The advertisers spend money on those ads, but they know the audience doesn't want to pay.. but fortunately, their products might be free too, because they can also be funded by ads (served to the same audience).

This intelligent design provides infinite money and infinite growth!

[jstummbillig]

> That's some interesting economy there.. 850m users are not paying, so we'll fund the product by displaying advertisements to those users that do not pay.

That is... not interesting. That is how the ad supported web worked for the past 20 years.

[khurs]

It's only for a few months, till AGI is finished...

[zb3]

Not really, what we should ask is how much of the revenue comes from:

- scams and fraud

- misattribution

- advertisers that don't actually care about the ROI

[paxys]

They people who don’t pay for ChatGPT still spend money on toothpaste and movies and cars and cereal and a million other things. There’s a reason the advertising industry exists.

[zb3]

Are you sure that's because of online ads? (which I don't see due to ad blockers)

> There’s a reason the advertising industry exists.

I think we'd need to pause online ads to understand their true effect.. I know people buy things, but attributing these choices to the fact that an ad was displayed to the same user some days ago doesn't sound reliable to me.

[cess11]

"Ads are inevitable."

Not at all. They could even be prohibited by law, as evidenced by prohibitions of some ads being common in most jurisdictions and the Clean City Law of São Paulo.

One of the grand old men of modern advertising said that "man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard", and suggested that he would eventually turn to covert militant direct action against it. I suspect that he would have extended this to screen ads if he had lived long enough to experience them.

[hightrix]

Ads are inevitable.

Enshittification is inevitable.

Interesting how those two sentences are directly aligned. I hate ad culture.