What I think is really incredible about this is that they are selling a ton of subscriptions, both personal and business subscriptions. So the fact that they are doing advertising on top of this suggests to me that they are in a deep deep hole, much deeper than he probably would have imagined when making this statement. If your revenue is 25 billion and you still need ads, your costs must be running you down at a pace you really didn't anticipate.
reply> If your revenue is 25 billion
replyIt isn't. They had a one-month period around February that, if every month ran like taht, would constitute a yearly revenue of 25 billion. The fact that they appear to not have published a new annualized revenue number since then suggests that the trend is not upwards, which would make sense with the growing number of companies that are asking questions about ROI on AI expenses and cutting their token spend.
I think there are rules about public disclosures in a run up to an IPO. They may not be able to publish updates until the official IPO process begins.
replyOr they ran the numbers and saw that they'll make more money with ads than without. I doubt they care about anything but the bottom line.
reply> But if we can find something that doesn't do that, I'd prefer that.
replyThere's nothing plausible that can do that, and he knew that, and was basically just saying "we're going to put ads on it" in a way that challenges you to explain what a better option would be.
You're giving Sam too much credit. I think he had no idea that competition would catch up so fast and they got caught with their pants down.
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