alt Hacker News> $20/month product with ads
That's a Netflix + Hulu subscription - with ads in both. Before streaming people regularly paid $50/mo (not adjusted for inflation) for cable TV with ads.
While it's easy to bemoan Google pushing ads into every corner of our digital lives, I think they arguably offered an unprecedented level of services relative to the number of ads, and we all got used to that.
Now whether OpenAI could ever push enough ads to make a profit: I have no idea! It's very interesting to see this race actually start.
Maybe it is more successful elsewhere, but over here the type of ads and repetition make me think more money is spent on ad infrastructure than is gained in revenue (eg. three ads in a show, all identical, all advertising the platform you are watching). I'm left with the impression that the actual reason is not to sell ads, but to annoy customers into paying for higher tiers. It is not that we have gotten used to ads, but our dislike is being weaponized.