[adventured]

The same kind of speculation questioned whether Facebook would ever have a significant business. Before that, the same was asked about Google's business.

If GPT can maintain or grow usage, the ad dollars will be there given the enormous scale. There is a hundred billion dollars plus worth of advertising waiting in the LLM space. It would be surprising if Facebook doesn't contract for example, losing ground to LLMs on advertising over the coming decade.

[hsb3]

They have to build out all the backend ad tech crap that google and fb have built over decades. As in the campaign tools, scheduling, targeting, analytics, auctions, exchanges etc. Advertisers and publishers have already deeply integtated into that eco system. Also the google and fb system has created a content generating army that is incentivized to fight tooth and nail for eyeballs. OpenAI doesnt reduce the activities of the eyeball capture army, it just freaks them out and pushes them into overdrive.

[wonnage]

WhatsApp and Messenger have billions of users but don’t make much ad revenue. I’m sure there exists a way to show ads in ChatGPT that will be figured out eventually but so far nobody’s figured out how to monetize chat as a medium

Also it’s basically free for Google to show you a sponsored result but embedding one in a ChatGPT response actually costs money (assuming they’re part of the generated response).

Lastly I will bet you one Stargate datacenter that Meta has thought about LLM-based advertising, and if there’s any low hanging fruit there it’s already been tried

[fragmede]

> WhatsApp and Messenger have billions of users but don’t make much ad revenue.

Not directly, but I bet that connection graph is worth millions. Same with the Giphy keyboard purchase. There's a whole unseen economy of data being valuable for reasons that aren't widely discussed.

[watwut]

Facebook was in financial loss until it got really serious about pushing ads and outrage. People who speculated that Facebook is not earning much on ads while Facebook was not earning much on ads were correct. Same with Googles business.

And also, very relatedly, both companies enshittified their products great deal in the process. Google search used to be better for average user, Facebook used to be better for average user.

Genimi can start pushing ads everywhere, can start using dark patterns to better manipulate us and one they will. They will start earning more money at that point.