For several early years search was thought to have no great business model (banner ads and similar). And then it did.
replyGoTo.com -> Google -> $$$
These exact words were said tens of thousands of times about Facebook (am old enough to remember those discussions :) ), “no way they can monetize on mobile” (this was the most fun).
replyrules are simple, if you have Xbn or XXXm users on your system, you will make big bank in ads eventually
It's tempting to look at trends and assume there must be a rule behind them, but it's also intellectually lazy. Please do the hard work of justifying your stance like GGP did.
replyit is a simple stance - if you have a product that is used by hundreds of millions of people ad monetization strategy will be found cause there are people a lot smarter than you and me that will get it done. here’s intellectual challenge - find a business with comparable number of users to openai which is not swimming in ad revenue - one will do
replyA counterpoint is that there are many products with significant usage that fail or never attempt advertising monetization. They just increase the cost of the product.
replySnapchat
replyTotal Quarterly Revenue (Q4 2024): $1.55 billion in total revenue, with $1.41 billion coming from advertising
replyBasically all their revenue is ad revenue and not too bad
At that time, Facebook provided a free service without any real competitors. The masses will switch to Meta AI or Gemini or Claude at the drop of an ad that annoys them enough.
replyGemini, GPT and Claude will all have ads on the consumer side. They will go together in quasi lock-step into the ad future, because that money is gigantic and they're going to need it.
replyThe masses will have no say in the matter. Just as they had no say in the matter with Google's ads getting ever more intrusive, or cable prices previously, or streaming prices going perpetually higher in the present, or YouTube ads, or anything else. Consumers will have no say in the matter, they'll take it and that's that.
With only three relevant competitors (maybe Mistral in Europe), there will be nowhere to flee the deployment of ads.
amazing this is even a debate, we have now decades of this across everything that reaches enough users, it is a certainty as much that the Sun will rise tomorrow morning. as probably many people here on HN I am designated computer-fixer for all my family so any family gathering I have to look at someone's computer about something. years ago I started checking whether browser(s) anything ad-blocking in place and I am 0 for million by now. while HN crowd might be theoretically pushing back on ads (even with like "I won't use this if there are ads" nonsense) general public is so used to ads that I sometimes feel it is welcomed change when some new service etc gets ads. I remember the first time I saw an ad on Amazon Prime Video and my daughter and I were like "no f'ing way!!!" and my wife was like "oh, ____ is on sale this weekend, cool!" :)
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