Aside from the marketing-ish tone and specific deeplinks to product purchase pages, the prominent Amazon logo and product description headline implied some degree of affiliation to my eyes. It seems like the evidence is that it would be foolish not to take the money for presenting such an obvious referral of a motivated buyer.
Frankly the example they posted seems like a fairly happy one, where the user is explicitly implying that they’re seeking a specific physical product to introduce to their life. We’ve all seen where those monetization incentives lead over time though.
But you’re right—not even so much as a tiny word “Ad” like Google does…
It's absolutely coming. I'm curious to see what their ad units will look like. IMHO ads in an LLM search world will look more like Facebook ads than Google ads. Brand advertising will stay focused on YouTube while click to buy and click to download are probably the best fit for the medium.
I'd be happy to have another Google clone, that doesn't have a login and is not a chat session. Go to https://search.ai , type my search query and look through the results, with ads on the side.
There are several classes of restrictions on free speech in the US. These include: obscenity, fraud, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, false statements of fact, and —- most relevant here -— commercial speech such as advertising.
Advertising has far less protection than is ordinarily afforded to the kind of speech you might do as a person.
No but once ChatGPT starts threatening Google's revenue model, maybe they will start putting effort into improving their drastically deteriorating search engine.
they need to win search share to threaten Google's revenue model: take traffic from google.com, so google will sell ads. Going to ads busyness is not necessary for this.
You are thinking you can pay them to not use your data? Think again. They will sneakily use your data anyway. If not yours, then the data of people who do not change setting xyz. Oops, the last update must have reset that option for some users.
So the issue is if you let people opt out by paying you’re left with a low intent, likely lower net worth group of people to advertise to. As a result those eyeballs are worth less. The advertisers will turn to other platforms if you only let the worst people see their ads.
Unless enough people all pay, the whole thing stops working. But there aren’t enough people who will pay because most people don’t care.
Tldr: the ad supported business model fundamentally doesn’t work if you let all your best products (you) opt out by paying. It requires them to pay an amount far in excess of what they would be willing to pay for the system to work.
There's some truth to that, but Netflix, YouTube, etc seem to be OK with both ad-supported and paid ad-free versions, so I think the logic you described does not always dominate the considerations.
> Honestly, if I can disable ads by paying them, then I'm ok with it.
The modern maxim is: any content platform large enough to host an ad sales department will sell ads
Vanishingly few (valuable) consumers have zero tolerance for ads, so not selling ads means leaving huge sums of money on the table once you get to a certain scale. Large organizations have demonstrated that they can't resist that opportunity.
The road out is to either convince everyone to have zero tolerance for ads (good luck), to just personally opt for disperse, smaller vendors that distinguish themselves in a niche by not indulging, or to just support and use adversarial ad blockers in order to take personal control. Hoping that the next behemoth that everybody wants to use will protect you from ads is a non-starter. Sooner or later, they're going to take your money and serve you ads, just like the others.
They did not get addicted to selling ads, have billions in revenue from paying subscribers, and don't have to wean themselves off of ads (as Google and Meta would love to do).
