alt Hacker NewsAds will be no longer a buisness model in 3-5 years when simple, locally run models that do nothing besides blocking ads become available. Twitter, Facebook etc. already get past most modern adblockers, but the AI extension will be able to filter them. In-text advertising must be marked as advertisment in most countries, and even if it isn't, local AI will filter this probably out. So a free ChatGPT service with in-text AI can simply be countered by another local browser extension, that rewrites the text and removes ads.
One can make the point that Google, Meta and others are investing so much into AI as they know, we are facing the end of the ad-based internet economy. The investments are to create new buiness models, because their old ones are gone soon.
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More than an extension, imagine us having good enough, fast enough, vision models that you never even see a real website. Maybe the whole OS in Microsoft's case if they keep putting more ads in. It will be a level of inefficiency inconceivable but really something.
I pray you are right. Still, there's no guarantee that the next business model won't be an order of magnitude more user-hostile.
Sad truth is vast majority of users today are not savvy enough to install a good adblocker. We live in a bubble here in technology where we assume people know to do things like block ads. Really at this point people don’t know what files are anymore or even what a website actually is.
Adblockers already remove the vast majority of ads. Adtech works because most people dont use them.
Alternatively, DRM for websites will start being a thing and remove any possibility of blocking ads.