Important to note Anthropic has next to no consumer usage

Ben Thompson has long been insistent that ChatGPT and other AI tools basically have to have ads and it's been a big mistake they didn't have them sooner. It's an interesting take:

> What I think is clear is they have to build an advertising product, and the reason they have to build an advertising product is any consumer Internet product has to be advertising, because it’s such a beneficial model to everyone involved, and the reason it’s so beneficial is you get to indefinitely and infinitely increase average revenue per user without any worries about price elasticity, because the entire increase in average revenue per user is borne by the advertisers who are paying it willingly because they’re getting a positive return on their investment, and everyone’s using it for free so you can reach the whole world. Then what happens with that is once you get that model going, you have a massive R&D advantage, because you have so much more money coming in than anyone who doesn’t have that cycle or who has to charge users for it.

https://stratechery.com/2026/ads-in-chatgpt-why-openai-needs...

> This point, more than anything else, explains why the company so desperately needs an advertising model. Advertising is the only potential business model that can meaningfully bend the revenue curve such that the company can not just fund its compute but gain leverage on it, for all of the reasons I laid out before: first, advertising increases the breadth of the business, in that you can offer a better product to more people, increasing usage and expanding inventory. Second, advertising increases the depth of the business, in that there is infinite upside in terms of average revenue per user: more usage means more inventory on one hand, and building out the capability for effective targeting and high conversion rates increases the amount that advertisers are willing to pay — even as the cost to the user remains the same (ideally free).

It's valuable to remember that advertisers will pay more per user than users will, and that's hard to beat in a competitive market.

RemindMe! 2 years

Since when does HN welcome blatant self-advertising posts like this one ?

So apparently they're going to run a Super Bowl ad about ChatGPT having ads (without saying ChatGPT of course)........ Has doing an ad that focuses only on something about your competitor ever been the best play? Talk about yourself.

Obviously it's a play, honing in on privacy/anti-ad concerns, like a Mozilla type angle, but really it's a huge ad buy just to slag off the competitors. Worth the expense just to drive that narrative?

Ads playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLf2m23nhTg1OW258b3XBi...

I really want to applaud Anthropic; I remain cautiously optimistic, but I’m not certain how long they will maintain this posture. I will say that the recent announcement from OpenAI has put me off from ChatGPT — I use Gemini occasionally, because it’s the devil I know. OpenAI has gone back and forth on their positions so many times in a way that feels truly hostile to their users.

Plus, I’m not a huge fan of Sam Altman.

Does the veneer of goodness despite (alleged) cutthroat business practices from Anthropic bother anyone else?

[dead]

!remind me in two years

/s