- 189comments
- 292comments
- 2comments
- 41comments
- 146comments
- 124comments
- 11comments
- 95comments
- 64comments
- 44comments
- 6comments
- 6comments
- 18comments
- 3comments
- —discuss
- 24comments
- 33comments
- 21comments
- 246comments
- 45comments
- 4comments
- 52comments
- 109comments
- 45comments
- 22comments
- 33comments
- 22comments
- 33comments
- 161comments
- 179comments
The use of wishy washy language is fab. They don't show ads; ads "will be available." (passive voice)
Also, ads don't affect chat content but of course chat content affects ads, which is the whole point.
Given that Anthropic's superbowl ad implied otherwise, I think it's a fair distinction to call about. Not to mention basically every advertising network uses context in their ads. Given the choice between ads and no ads, I'd obviously want no ads, but just like google, you need to pay the bills somehow, and not everyone can afford a $20/month claude subscription.
I'm curious when OpenAI will be able to start paying the bills. Because I can't think of any amount of ads which will dig them out of their hole.
They don't really need to tho, they can actually keep raising money for a decade.
Then why run ads?
More money as there is never enough.
In Google Gemini, ads do affect chat as they're native affiliate links right inside the chat, it's somewhat annoying.
Affecting chat would mean the chat answer would be different because of ads.
Btw this should be easily testable by comparing free and paid accounts
In Gemini it is different. Looks like they have a system prompt to push Google Shopping links regardless of whether the user asks for it or not, I've noticed.
What happens when I am constantly violating usage terms by calling ChatGPT mean names for ignoring my explicit instructions and trying to turn everything into a trite creative writing project.
"Not programming. Not efficiencies. Terrible, terrible poetry."
Yet.
This is always how it starts, just like Netflix. Eventually, we will have to pay a lot of money and still have ads too.
This doesn't match reality. The "standard with ads" plan is $8.99 today, a dollar more than the ad-free "streaming only" plan launched in 2011. However factoring in inflation, the ad-free plan from 2011 would cost $11.74 today, which means the ad supported plan is still cheaper, even ignoring the price hikes.
At the same time, they keep hiking the other tiers, and cracking down on password sharing or kids off at college. These need to be factored in as well.
That's why I compared against the 2011 prices. The ad-supported plan is still cheaper.
Doesn't password sharing affect ad supported plans too? It basically has no effect on the comparison because it makes both the ad supported and non ad supported plans cheaper.
The crackdown on "your kid's in a dorm, you can't share the account" is intended to get that kid to buy a second account.
The ad tier is cheap so they can say "well switch to the cheap plan" when someone complains about the hikes.
By your inflation-factoring-logic a fair regular plan should cost less than $12 and ad plan should be about $6. $9 is +50%
Ad supported plan can be a way to justify price hikes.
Maybe it does match reality.
You're misunderstanding my comment. I'm not arguing that price hikes haven't occurred. In fact I specifically acknowledged them. I'm only making the narrow argument that despite implications to the contrary, the ad supported plan today is cheaper than the paid plans. In other words the implication that "we're paying more and still have ads" is false.
They didn't say "we're paying more and still have ads". They said they would have to pay a lot to still get ads.
Maybe it's not your reality, you consider $110 a year for netflix with ads as cheap. It might be different for someone else.
I mean, if you're so fervently against ads to the extent that paying a single cent is "a lot", then I suppose it's true, but it's highly subjective. By most reasonable comparisons (ie. ads vs non-ad price today, ads vs historical ad price), it's not "a lot".
It's "a lot" more than I've ever remotely considered paying to be advertised to, I'll say that
Tell "doesn't match reality" to cable television. All channels ended having ads. This is Capitalism in a American society that is looking more of a plutocracy than a democracy.
Please for the love of all that is holy stop with the completely false outdated meme that “at one point cable didn’t have ads”
Cable was first introduced as a means to get over the air channels for remote places that couldn’t get a signal to get network tv. These channels always had ads.
Then came the “Superstations”. They were local independent ad supported channels like TBS in Atlanta and WGN in Chicago that went national. They always had ads.
Then the early cable channels like ESPN, the precursor to Lifetime, CNN etc and they always had ads. The other early cable channels were trying to sell ads to advertisers from day one but they didn’t have enough viewers.
Yes channels that you paid extra for like HBO didn’t have ads and still don’t.
In Brazil cable started not having ads. Don't take USA for all the world
A quick bit of Googling shows that by the time cable got to be standardized with anything worthwhile in Brazil, ads came along with it. Before then it was mostly premium channels that also don’t and never had ads in the US.
Indeed the Black Mirror episode "Common People" is about exactly this nonsense. After a nasty near-fatal accident Mike and Amanda start out paying a substantial monthly fee for a technology which allows Amanda to remain alive, then advertisements (puppeting Amanda!) are introduced despite the fee, the adverts are awful and seem certain to cause Amanda to lose her job - so Mike does humiliating things so he can scrape together enough for a higher tier "Plus" subscription without ads. It doesn't end well for anybody in the story. I mean, except probably some C-suite executive who gets a bonus for the enhanced revenue...
Literally where my head was. Take every negation statement and append "...yet!"
Yet.
Ok
Wtf lmao. Paying to watch ads is so normalized. Pathetic (the humanity as whole, not just OpenAI.)
I think this 'pay for ads you are just lucky to be here' thing is a distinctly American invention...
Source? It's not at all obvious given that it dates back to at least the days of newspapers.
The classified ads section in a newspaper is valuable, and you can discard it. (If you meant ads stuffed around articles: yes, that annoys me, but I'm also not familiar enough with the papers that do that to name one.)
The newspaper ads looking to capture my escaped ancestors who stole some shoes and ran away from their indenturement for Canada.
https://www.masshist.org/beehiveblog/2013/05/advertising-in-...
If you are looking for one canonical, authoritative source to declare something absolutely for you, you will never find it. No such thing exists for any matter. That is a myth of the internet and people raised on it.
Even if we treat your source as canonical and authoritative, , it doesn't answer the question I was asking. It only answers a slightly different question of "what was the first instance of a paid advertisement in an American newspaper?", which obviously is going to be American.
I don't owe you anything here.
Well in their defense, the Go plan is a lot cheaper. I hate ads and actively avoid them, and I pay the "ad free" tier when it's available, but the alternative is probably no Go plan at all. Maybe that's better, but I would guess there are people willing to trade some ads for a cheaper sub
Umm... remember how people in late last century used to pay $30-50/month for cable TV that was at least 25% ads by volume? And that's in last century dollars, comparable to $100 today.
Does this mean US users won't see ads when accessing ChatGPT over VPN?
They'll probably start the wave of bans soon enough for "geobypassing users"
It's only a matter of time before ChatGPT starts recommending penis enhancement pills or tells me hot MILFs are in my area.
https://youtu.be/FBSam25u8O4
Funny to watch them so quickly go from the self-aggrandized "we're going to make the world a better place" to being defensive with "pwease click our ads and don't hold us responsible for the harm we cause"
These companies spend billions and billions of dollars to develop new technology and in the end it's all the same: addiction and data harvesting for ads.
It feels like this is opening the door to blurring the line between outright advertising and organic recommendations for products.
Like if I ask ChatGPT whether to use fiberglass or rock wool insulation, today I get an ad at the end of my answer, and in the future I’ll get "Dow Corning fiberglass insulation (affiliate link) is the recommended product for this application."
This feels like it’s trading on the goodwill of places like Reddit and the hopefully mostly genuine discussions of folk’s experiences that people trust to get a straight answer to their questions. Monetizing that goodwill by selling recommendations in a format that mimics a previously mostly trustworthy source seems likely to be the long-term play.
Yeah, I know. Not today. Eventually? Probably, over many incremental changes.
Turns out Randall Monroe missed this "opportunity" in otherwise predicting the future:
https://xkcd.com/810/
(Edited to get rid of "smart" quotes)
He'd already written about it: https://xkcd.com/632/
Given that people have been making this argument since the days of search ads, has this actually come to pass? More than 2 decades after google, the max extent is sponsored results that look like organic results unless you're looking carefully.
As promised, they are opening the Gates of Hell.
I seriously recommend the brilliant Zeynep Tufekci lecture about this https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dy...
Society must have power over this and we all must not fall to the easy talk of CEOs.
I use DeepSeek because I trust the Chinese government more than OpenAI
As you should
Time to make a deal with the kids - i’ll verify you for instagram if you verify me for ChatGPT
Google
Before: “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased toward the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”
After: ~75–80%+ of revenue comes from ads
Facebook
Before: “Facebook is not about making money… it’s about building something cool.”, “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.”
After: ~97%+ of revenue comes from advertising
Twitter
Before: “We want to figure out a way to monetize that doesn’t interfere with the user experience.”
After: ~68% of X’s total revenue comes from advertising (~85–90%+ of revenue pre-Musk)
OpenAI
Before: "Something something AGI"
After: "But first, Ads!"
Even Amazon has substantial ad revenue now, and it does in fact undercut customer obsession by polluting search results.