This kills me, and you're right - there's no escaping the ads even with a sub. Take online journalism as an example.

We're already being double-billed. Expensive subscription news like WSJ, Bloomberg and it's been a while but even FT require ad blockers even if you're subscribed.. If you're not subscribed you don't even see the ads because you can't see the full article.

It's wild that we've normalized this. There's no longer any argument in favor of an ad model when you're paying 20-30 dollars a month already - in this case, one wonders how journalism survives if they need that AND the ad revenue to pay the bills! It feels more like greed than "support."

>Google realized this a long time ago; there is no ad-free paid version of Google Search.

Google actually experimented with this about a decade ago (I know, I was one of the suckers who paid), but it got canned because why the fuck would you pay google when u-bloc is free?

Companies absolutely will offer ad-free experiences. Google has youtube premium, which even compensates creators with half your sub as well. Evenly distributed too.

People get wrapped around the axle of ad-subsidized models, the "I pay and still see ads" but they just are confused about a hybrid monetization structure.

At some point the larger internet has to look itself in the mirror and recognize that it's either ads, credit card, or a hybrid of those.

And no, blocking is not an option, it just offloads costs onto honest users.

> The users paying $20 or $200/month for premium tiers of ChatGPT are precisely the ones you don't want to exclude from generating ad revenue.

but they're already paying you. While I appreciate the greed can be there, surely they'd be shooting themselves in the foot. There's many people who would pay who find advertising toxic and they have such huge volumes at free level that they'd be able to make a lot off a low impression cost.

> Google realized this a long time ago; there is no ad-free paid version of Google Search.

Ad-free YouTube costs $14 a month (and the creators get a higher payout from premium user views than they do from the free, ad-viewing users).

Given this specific family of product, the ads are essentially baked in - medium is the message and all.

LLM induced psychosis is one thing, but extremely subtle LLM induced brand loyalty or ideological alignment seem like natural attractors.

One day a model provider will be 'found out' for allowing paid placement among its training data. It's entirely possible that free-tier LLMs won't need banner ads - they'll just happen to like Pepsi a lot.

This is why we need to ban targeted advertising. In fact, I think ads should be 100% opt-in. The user has to accept them or it is illegal to show them to the user.

Strange that people even think this possibility is true. Name any other subscription that you can't use without ads?

- youtube

- hulu

- netflix

- spotify

- photoshop

I can't think of a single other one that one can use that still shows ads. Absurd proposition because llm's are more fungible and once you start forcing ads, competitors will barge in.

Counter example: Kagi.

Maybe it’s “inevitable” in the long run, but Google didn’t start out plastering their search results with ads. They did very well with text-only ads in the margin, and it was a slippery slope from there, but it took decades. Also, they are still only running text-only ads, even though there are a lot of them.

The timing isn’t inevitable. Is OpenAI going to speedrun to the endgame? Not sure they need to.

> Google realized this a long time ago; there is no ad-free paid version of Google Search.

well there is also no 200$/month Google Search subscription

It also skews towards power users, as it allows for more ad inventory. If they're going to do an ad auction marketplace with bidding snd such then they're likely to rollout slowly to keep auction pressure and bids high enough. Expand to too much inventory and CPMs will drop like crazy.

There would be competition from API wrappers, if you want to pay there will always be lots of options to chat without ads. I hate to think what they and others might come up with to try and thwart this.

There's absolutely no way this is happening. Want to bet?

No, there's GSuite / Google Workspace instead. OpenAI doesn't have one of those.

> I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers, even the expensive paid ones.

The counter for this is that people hate being double-billed like this.

All hail APIs!