Previously (yesterday):<p><i>Our approach to advertising</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649577">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649577</a> - Jan 2026 (227 comments)
If ads are clearly labeled as "ad" or "sponsored", and they only appear for free users, I think seeing ads is a pretty reasonable price to pay for those who want to use the service for free.<p>If they're not labeled, or are shown even to paying users, I think that's a problem.
All ads start as clearly labeled and distinctive. Then via the magic of iteration and A/B testing they magically evolve to become visually indistinguishable from the rest of the content except for what’s required by law.
They'll eventually want to set it up so you read the sponsored content first, before seeing the tag saying it's an ad. You're more likely to absorb it then.<p>Especially if it's LLM-generated to fit with the context, the message will slip right into the mind. Then a little "(Sponsored)" at the bottom after you've already consumed the ad.<p>This is a bit like how ads are presented on X, they look like regular posts or replies but they usually feel off topic and you're thinking "huh, this doesn't fit the discussion". But LLMs will allow much more seamless and sneaky ads.
You don’t say<p><a href="https://9to5mac.com/2026/01/16/iphone-apple-app-store-search-results-ads-new-design/" rel="nofollow">https://9to5mac.com/2026/01/16/iphone-apple-app-store-search...</a>
The iron law of encrapification: if a company can make more money by downgrading the user experience, it will. I imagine within Apple there were still people who advocated for a better, more transparent user experience, but ultimately they seem to have lost out to services people who just want to grab more money.<p>It's unfortunate because user experience was a core differentiating advantage for Apple that got them to where they are now.
IMO that's unavoidable when you're a public company beholden to shareholders who only care about short term stock prices.<p>OK, maybe not <i>all</i> shareholders are playing the short game, but I feel like a lot of them are.
I don't understand, Apple users <i>did</i> get a more "transparent" experience /s
And of course they will start collecting more information about users, and build an entire intelligent data extraction system around it.
Come now, don't be evil!
>only appear for free users<p>Why would advertisers prefer people without money to people with money?
The question is flawed.<p>People who do not pay for ChatGPT often have money and prefer not to pay for for a subscription for several reasons including, but not exclusively:
1) They don't use ChatGPT often enough to justify it
2) They use alternatives primarily (a subset of #1)
3) They choose to spend their money on other things
Plenty of free users have lots of money. Not wanting to pay for something != not being able to pay for something.
Maybe at the beginning ... but with time? who knows ...<p>Btw, the end game is probably having ads in the llm context .... or directly in the llm training set.
Every other iteration of a service that introduces a free ad-paid tier then ratchets it to bifurcation of premium in to 'premium' and 'premium with no ads' and then on and on.
Just like Google at the beginning
My bet is that there will be ads for both groups. The paid group is arguably more valuable from an advertiser’s standpoint, and you can target heavy users with more granularity.
They already confirmed it’ll also appear in the (lowest) paid tier.
I agree but I fear it won't stay that way. They boil us frogs slowly.
The article says they will be clearly labeled and only for free accounts
They will also appear to users paying $8/month, not just free.
And if you ask chatgpt about major sponsors, a few years from now, it’ll honestly answer, even if that means badmouthing them, etc.<p>Also, everyone gets a free pony.
Sometimes it's a fallacy, but sometimes the slope really is slippery (see: cable TV, Netflix, etc)
I’d rather they served ads. The economy is somewhat broken right now, with the way these things are bypassing all regular information channels. This will hopefully create lots and lots of new business for 3rd parties again.<p>Ideally, they’ll introduce a whole new level of targeting relevance, which will be good for both advertisers and prospects.
Thinking about the power and reach of political ads served by social media companies over the past 10 years, this is gonna be a whole nother bucket of worms.
these ads don't solve the broken economy. The original creators of some content that was stolen by OpenAI will not get a piece of the ad pie.
we’re talking about different things. there’s meritocratic fairness where producers are paid fairly for their work, and there’s a functioning economy, where there are simply enough economic opportunities to sustain established norms of commercial participation by the broad population.
OpenAI is in a tough spot.<p>I just canceled my $200/month GPT-Pro subscription. 5.2-Pro is in decline -- it has been getting noticeably worse at a steady rate since introduction. At this point, it's not appreciably better for most queries than Claude 4.5 Opus, and Opus is roughly 10x faster.
Noticed the same. Also, I noticed the same with the prev version, immediately improved when switching to the new 5.2.<p>The smoking gun is the time. If I ask it a question that's subtle in "thinking" mode and it starts replying in a few seconds, the answer will probably be trash. I'm almost sure they degrade the models over time.
An interesting approach - start strong when everyone is running benchmarks, taper off through the life of the release, introduce new version that is no better than the last version but it magically seems much better by comparison to the degraded previous version. Rinse, repeat, grift.
My impression is that recently ChatGPT tries to avoid
going out to research on the Internet as long as it can. I have to tell it to pull info from the web or verify its answers on the web explicitly.<p>Could it be that they are trying to save traffic?
My non-existent marketing instinct would tell me that they are trying to keep you inside the app to convince you that ChatGPT <i>is</i> the internet, the same way some people wouldn't know there's life outside Facebook.<p>My grumpy instinct tells me they know that they're poisoning the internet and they have given out on trying to weed out the fake websites from the real ones.
Or Opus 4.5 has gotten better since release? Can not point my finger at it but the code I get is most of the time super flawless.
In favor of what?
I'll be interested to see how long the ads remain blockable, if at all, by adblockers (on the web UI, at least).<p>Or to put it another way, I'll be interested to see how long before the ads become inseparable from the actual content of the response.
I’d be curious what proportion of their usage is on the mobile app and doesn’t need to worry about a significant number of users having adblockers. My instinct would be probably a decent majority is mobile, but not as high as something like Facebook, but that’s just a guess.
I wonder if using a local llm to override the ads would work. A finetuned one for removing ads will probably appear soon
How will you know your response doesn't contain an ad?<p>I see it as the responses eventually mimicking all of the marketing spam posts, where company Y compares it's competitors poorly or does a thought leadership piece on how you can do X by hand or have their product do X for you.
This comment brought to you by Carls Jr
"I’ll get back to your question in a second, but before that a word from our sponsors…"
When you don't know how to monetize your service, you add ads.
From a very entertaining Matt Levine article (<a href="https://archive.is/8QYxl" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/8QYxl</a>)<p>> In a science fiction story, if you invented a superintelligent robot and asked it how to make money, it might come up with cool never-before-seen ideas, or at least massive fun market manipulation. But in real life, if you train a large language model on the internet and ask it how to make money, it will say “advertising, affiliate shopping links and porn.” That’s the lesson the internet teaches!<p>But I think it makes a lot of sense for very popular consumer products. In my honest opinion, I much prefer having services like Google, Youtube, Gmail, Maps, ChatGPT etc exist for free, but with ads, rather than not exist at all. Preferably with an option to pay and remove ads<p>Nowadays I'm happy to pay for Youtube premium or LLM, but back during my student days I could not really afford it - and I'm glad there was a free tier (with ads)
>In my honest opinion, I much prefer having services like Google, Youtube, Gmail, Maps, ChatGPT<p>I don't use any of these except YouTube (if only I could find the content elsewhere…) and I still pay for them when I purchase anything advertised on these properties because, of course, the companies advertising on Google makes all their customers pay for the <i>free</i> (lol) services. All advertising expenses are included in the price of the products, even if you never saw any ads.<p>We could easily charge for each of these services and still have them. Advertising is not necessary at all. It's just a way to make others pay for your services. It's a free riding problem to externalize costs on those who don't partake in the scheme.<p>Pay your share and don't call free what others will subsidize. Unless if a public service and we collectively agree on the split (vote and taxes, which we can debate publicly)
Right. But a good portion of the world can't afford the premium and having access to these services is still valuable. For every broke student or someone from a poor background, who probably don't make any money for the company (due to not buying advertised stuff), there's someone from a well off background, who will more than subsidize it by virtue of clicking on a lawyer ad (or whatever)<p>Nowadays I'm happy to pay, but that wasn't always the case. And I personally think that having an ad tier and fee tier is fine. Serves everyone
Or you end up with one of the greatest business models of all time like Google?<p>I struggle to understand people getting butt hurt about a free service showing its users adverts, that will keep the service free.<p>They should have done this earlier, so their adds would be better by now, and they have a better chance against Google.
It wasn't that long ago I got down voted on HN for saying this was going to happen.
As a general rule of thumb in sites like Reddit and HN - the quality of votes is significantly lower than the quality of comments. This is because it takes much more effort to comment, so there is a selection bias.
Yeah… I don’t understand how anyone could look at the prevalence of advertising and affiliate links on the internet and believe they would for some reason stay away from the LLM products.<p>Sure Sam Altman and his $200/mo subscribers won’t see them, but it was clear they were coming for free users.
Voting can be for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes I downvote things like that because I want to bury bait that would send an argument into a well-trodden and boring direction.
It’s disturbing just how much more insidious ads could be through a chat bot
Good thing I didn't develop an unnecessary dependency on this product, so now I don't have to suffer through its enshittification. It's almost like it was obvious this was going to happen years ago.<p>By the way don't sleep on this detail:<p>> The banner ads will appear in the coming weeks for logged-in users of the free version of ChatGPT *<i>as well as the new $8 per month ChatGPT Go plan*</i><p>Even if you pay for the product, you're still the product. If we don't own our software, our software will own us.
That means they're in a bad shape because this was labeled a last resort by Sam himself in 2024.
Why is this news? I saw ads on ChatGPT months ago...
Ads and erotica! The two best ways of monetizing life-changing tech and not puffed up hype!
Ad Generated Income
It's not about how it starts. It always starts small and measured, but once you open up to ads, you open up the pandora's box of enshittification paths.
Does anybody else think that OpenAI is lowering their output speed so you have to spend more time on the site?
At least they’re speed running their downfall.
I have made some purchasing decisions on expensive products based on analysis ChatGPT has done for me, if they can capitalize on that, it could be a decent way to make some money, as long as they remain unbiased and basically just function as an affiliate marketer. Sometimes I do want to be sold on something.
AI is so life changing that nobody wants to pay for it.
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