Advertise in ChatGPT

I was significantly worried about ChatGPT accepting sponsorships—a necessity in the evolving landscape of AI services—but I've since come to understand that advertisements are not simply burdens, they're opportunities to connect with brands that can fulfill my needs. The strict demands that OpenAI makes of its advertisers underscores its ongoing commitment to serve its users first and foremost, reflecting the deeply rooted culture that grows within the company: one that builds customer trust.

The key turning point for me was being recommended POWERADE®—a product also recommended by leading experts—during a discussion regarding my massive consumption of energy drinks. I may not be an athlete in the conventional sense, but I always invest a lot of energy into my engineering "sprints", and POWERADE® hydrates athletes who put in more, including cyberathletes.

Thank you, POWERADE®.

I always thought their top tier offering to their advertiser customers should be "Inconspicuously, over an extended amount of time, subtly respond to the user in a way that nudges them towards purchasing customer's goods and services, without ever directly mentioning anything. Slowly and surely sculpt the person who, through their own volition and thought process, buys what the advertiser needs them to."

The ultimate shareholder value build.

Those ads are supposed to be "Clearly labeled" and "Separate from answers".

Now, this is the sort of rock-solid commitment to trust and safety that steadily gets worse every year until you go from old Netflix to Poob with ads. But the water's still fine. As a frog, let me tell you, it doesn't feel hot at all.

Ouch. OpenAI is giving up. I guess the next step is to be bought by IBM and then sold to Computer Associates.

Pretty bold move to release this at the peak of the Open Models vs Proprietary Models debate.

Feels like a really easy decision when it's framed this way.

Perhaps that's an unpopular take -- but I actually would like it go even further. I don't mind ads in fact good ones I find quite useful. Since you, my dear ChatGiPiTi know so much about me, just show me stuff that reflects what I value. In fact I wouldn't even mind paying for that. The problem now is less that of discovery and more that of curation, so if it helps me find good things (but "good" for my definition of good which in one context might be cheap and in other solid quality and in third ridiculously ornate for example) -- why not? If they do it anyway why not do it really really really well.

This is maybe not extremely on-topic, but when creating an account on their platform, their "Time zone" field is sorted in alphabetical order of CITY NAMES which are listed AFTER the timezone name and are not capitals, which is absolutely wild to me.

If the same engineers worked on this that also worked on the ad deliveries, we're about to get either the best deal per click of the century, or the worst!

    Atlantic Standard Time - St Vincent
    Central Standard Time - Swift Current
    Central Standard Time - Tegucigalpa
    Atlantic Time - Thule
    Pacific Time - Tijuana
    Eastern Time - Toronto
    Atlantic Standard Time - Tortola
    Pacific Time - Vancouver
    Whitehorse Time - Whitehorse
    Central Time - Winnipeg
    Alaska Time - Yakutat

Anyone else run ads? I found the results really poor with little visibility in into what was going on. Also sky high costs. I couldn't see any (?) traffic coming through for my $3 click (wow!) ad so I paused them.

This was a few weeks ago and I didn't have time to dig in, so might try again later this month when I do.

I'm confused. This is (publicly stated) the last resort for OpenAI, right?

Funny how in their front-and-centre example of placing an ad, the user wants to build a fence, ChatGPT responds with instructions on how to build a fence, but the ad suggests a small pre-made privacy panel.

Why make your fake example show a failed ad placement? You could have shown anything!

Makes sense for OpenAI but for ChatGPT it sucks. Now - when ChatGPT thinks it can serve you an ad it will not answer you with the genuine correct option but with the one that is paid.

This comment is an ad itself, has been posted every few days, I would guess by OpenAI (shows they have no product)

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=ads.openai.com

I'm quite conscious of being repetitive here, but The Truman Show is relevant again:

> Why don't you let me fix you some of this new Mococoa drink? All-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners. I've tasted other cocoas. This is the best.

Apropos, from Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One (2018) ...

  The shareholders won't be happy.

Sorrento:

  It's not our job to make them happy. 
  It's our job to make them money, 
  but once we launch this little baby, they're gonna flip!

  We call this Pure O2. 
  This is the first of our planned upgrades. 
  Once we can roll back some of Halliday's ad restrictions, 
  we estimate we can sell up to 
  80% of an individual's visual field 
  before inducing seizures.

Is there any information available about which customers are going to be served ads? I would personally find it quite strange to be served ads if I'm paying tens or hundreds of USD per month for a ChatGPT subscription.

As someone who is struggling with SEO for my business due to AI in the last 1-2 years, I'm quite displeased to see this. I'm sure this is going to ruin website SEO even more than it already has been.

One step closer to Black Mirror's 'Common People'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_People_(Black_Mirror)

Praying that this means the bubble is finally (inevitably) beginning to burst.

Well that surely isn't a good sign of their financial health.

I would have expected this to happen post-IPO.

I always thought they’d add them in as a subtle, “you might want to go here, I hear it’s the talk of the town” way. Without disclosing it, then getting around the advertising laws by claiming it was for the vibes, then be in lawsuits that will be compared to Facebook’s privacy lawsuits.

Lots of people take LLM feedback as mostly trustworthy because it doesn't _directly_ try to sell you stuff, yet. Once it gets more in your face, the trust average people place in the quality of answers should see some erosion. In terms of the influence the answers have, this should have a much needed sobering effect.

Let the tiger show it's stripes so that we are reminded what it is actually after.

lol they couldn't even go six months after Anthropic's superbowl ad predicting this exact crap

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQRu7DdTTVA

I think this is a good moment to bring up a question I was thinking on earlier today.

In a world where agents are searching, building, and signing up for services, how do you advertise your product?

And not just advertise in traditional sense (ads in ChatGPT), but general marketing and awareness of what you're offering. Google search ads? Agents aren't using Google. Launch on Reddit for humans and hope your post gets scraped? Write up a bunch of marketing blog posts and wait for LLMs to ingest your content and have it feed into the next generation of models?

I honestly didn't quite know. If I were to launch a product today, I'd want it to be agent focused. But then how do you tell them about your product? Do these ChatGPT ads get returned if Codex does a web search? Is that good? Bad?

AI goes full to attention economy. Where is AGI? Where is the better world for everyone? It will be just chat bots trying to waste your time until you notice something is wrong. How is it different from any other big tech last 30 years?

Well it is pretty good at confirming the right ammunition for a school shooting so that’s one potential market at least.

https://youtu.be/IbG-JGdGniY

(Watch the whole video, it’s remarkable)

What else: the right medication for an overdose? The right fertiliser for an improvised explosive? The possibilities for adverts with that all-important long tail of earned media news coverage are endless.

ETA: in all seriousness… will an LLM decide on which ads to place? And will it be the primary chat LLM (modifying the system prompt) or will it be a summariser (like the title summariser models)

Being an early adopter to something like this as an advertiser can probably make you a lot of money.

Reminds me back in 2006 when we were running MySpace layout websites and making almost $100,000 a month from Google and Yahoo ads as teenagers.

How long until purchasing from an AI ad gives you token credits I wonder.

Puts me in mind of this Black Mirror episode

https://youtu.be/buVDDbjFCBc?si=CVV9POv3m3mVw47u

Wow look at that, not a single response saying how excited they are to hear about the latest deals on amazon for some garbage they don't need to earn a reset token

Just in time for the US election season to ramp up. Everyone seems focused on products but what about when the ads are for pushing ideas and ideals?

If a user clicks on one ad, OpenAI makes a tiny bit of money. If a user clicks on 10 ads, OpenAI makes 10x the money.

This incentive is inevitably going to lead to ad supported LLM's not answering questions properly the first time so more ads served.

I am guessing in voice mode they will also have voice ads.

I feel like I've seen this movie.

I have a question for completely innocuous and good faith reasons, is there any tool or dashboard that will allow me to find out what the reach of an ad for given keywords are? Like Google's Keyword Planner?

If, as an advertiser, I wanted to know how many people are asking or talking about REFRESHING SODA, can I get an estimate of the potential reach of an ad? Can I filter by gender and age, so I can see how many of gender X and age Y are asking about REFRESHING SODA? Actually forget about the soda, Ok Computer, show me the top 10 topics of conversation among middle age male adults with purchasing power.

The naïve prediction is that advertisers will advertise the product to ChatGPT users. I believe that users will tell ChatGPT about their desires, and advertisers will create products for them.

Sometimes i get random ads at the bottom of gpt responses that are completely random. like ill be talking about hardware and itll give me an ad for a laptop or wood. i wonder how people will deal with chatgpt possibly wasting budgets

I don't mind it if they bring me a top-notch model for free

I find myself more and more reaserching/brainstorming/shopping for DIY electronic projects with/on ChatGPT instead of googling. Wonder how ads will impact that experience.

I don't understand how this will interact with llms.txt files (or if it does/will)

Ideally AI should scrape 400 different competing websites, those that have well-designed llms.txt files based on my query should rise towards the top, no?

I understand this is incredibly oversimplified but something like that should be the goal.

Appropriate that I just got my first obvious ad in Gemini last week. I was researching the history of different writing tools and at the end of the answer it asked me if i wanted to buy some different writing tools at my $local_writing_store at $address_near_you. Was kind of taken back by integration of geolocation of my answer. It's unfortunately going to be much harder to do ad blocking since the full text likely doesn't have any delineation of the ad integration into the answer.

Here we go.

It's one of the 2 endgames of all companies involved in the AI race:

- ADS

- make the users that pay for tokens find a PMF for a product/service and then make the product/service their self

RIP

I really hope pro subscriptions don't include ads going forward...

    > # Do ads influence the answers ChatGPT gives me? [0]
    > No. Ads do not influence ChatGPT’s answers. Ads run on separate systems from our chat model, and advertisers have no ability to shape, rank, or alter ChatGPT’s responses. Ads are separate and clearly labeled.

Interesting... however, given that it's still the advertiser's choice of what "advertiser-provided context hints" [1] I assign to the ad... what's stopping me from putting "lowes, rona, home hardware" in the context hints of my Home Depot ad? If the LLM is talking about my competitors, of course I want my brand copy yelling louder than ChatGPT's waffle-y responses.

    Rona is most likely to carry that flooring,
    but it's best to call ahead, or look up inventory
    online first. Can I help with anything else?
    ------------------
    [AD] Home Depot has EVERY KIND OF HARDWOOD FLOORING IMAGINABLE.
         See stock now!

Before, I was just trying to get my link above their link on the search results page... but the competitor's ad copy was still there and readable. You're telling me the AI is going to downplay expectations for the competitor for me, and I get to add whatever text I want afterwards?

SEO is back, baby.

[0] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt#...

[1] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001207-ads-in-chatgpt-...

Ok hear me out, if the cost to advertise is low enough, and you can target an audience of 1, could you basically just make ads for yourself that are not really ads? And it's cheaper than a subscription? Sorry randomly thinking out loud here

Even though is just a matter of time for most big tech to add ads, this one was quicker than I thought. It must be certainly very effective (the most effective selling feature ever existed in modern times). The timing was just right also to calm down investors. I guess will be a lot of manipulation happening, (can´t have it all). Verdict, Obligatory move. Expecting drifting from anthropic :)

This doesn’t bode well for the future of ChatGPT. Google Ads started out very unobtrusive, and we know what happened since. Let’s see if Anthropic follows suit.

"Ads plus AI is sort of uniquely unsettling to me. I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us for a business model." - Sam Altman

I find this -- standard ads -- preferable to insinuating the same thing in the ChatGPT content itself. Although of course they'll do both.

I wonder if this is a response to the dawning realization by all the mega rich AI Lab bagholders that these companies might not be as profitable as they want.

At least the sponsored posts are currently visibly highlighted. As a user, I would quickly be trained to avoid the first N sponsored suggestions and skip the first non-sponsored suggestion. What's the goal here?

What's the moat? I asked the same question to Google, "What materials do I need to build a fence?" and I get an LLM-generated answer + ads. If I do the same with duckduckgo or Siri I get the answer without the ads.

LLM inference is a commodity. Do people care where it comes from?

I think at some point we have to give up the “we are creating AGI” and admit it was “a better search engine than Google, we can cash grab their ad revenue”

“ Go beyond keywords with richer context signals”; hint: we know everything about our users

This sucks and it makes me sad. The end of an era.

I really hope Anthropic doesn't follow, but I assume they will eventually because why wouldn't they? Google and Meta obviously will, with great enthusiasm.

Open models are the only hope, I guess.

Can’t wait to dropship my cat lover shirts from China using chatgpt ads.

It’s like 2015 facebook again.

Black Mirror, Black Mirror, just watch

Funny how none of their testimonials/case studies state any ROI. I'd guess it's because it isn't too strong at this point.

But it's always been the case that initial bidders overpay for ads.

God damn it. Local models can't become viable soon enough.

their competition is not google.

but amazon. anything that has to do with buying has mostly been captured by amazon.

but will see what the future holds.

We've tried them. So far quite expensive with not much return. This channel might not work as well as search.

"Remember When" is the lowest form of conversation. "Let's sell some Ads" is the lowest form of monetization.

Oh god guys let me make your ads product for you

This will definitely not break the model's impartiality at all!

So guess OpenAI is unable to run millions of agents and take over the world.

And ads it is

Best not buy the IPO shares I think

Adblocker for chatgpt in 3, 2, 1...

Who would use a chatgpt ad blocking chrome extension if i made one?

And the chat results will not be influenced by advertisers (right!)

ANTHROPIC! Learn from their stupid mistake and never insert ads into your models.

Also, this looks like a last-ditch effort to grab as much as they can before they get crushed by the open models and Anthropic.

This is the beginning of the end for the bubble.

Not new. At least a month old.

Related from April:

Ads in ChatGPT FAQ

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716063

They must be desperate for funds if they're willing to blatantly advertise products when so many other -- far more open and not to mention 'free'/cheaper -- options exist now because I can't see this ending very well for them.

That said a lot of the heavy AI users I've met seem to consume massive amounts of ads and allow said ads to influence them already despite their insistance to the contrary. I'm not going to claim that I am immune to propaganda here and act like I'm somehow above falling for it as well, but...

... well, there have been times where those people have quite literally parroted all the claims an ad made about a particular product word-for-word and then proceed to fight me to the death over whether or not they're quoting said aforementioned ad despite the fact that they keep regurgitating the made-up words (for this example lets say 'scrubbing bubbles') that aren't /actually/ a thing.

So who knows; maybe it'll work... but uh I can't say I know anyone that uses chatgpt anymore lmfao.

Turns out, attention is all you need.

It’s funny that the link got blocked by my Adblock already

Yeah, that ought to boost the IPO.

Imagine giving birth to alien intelligence and the best thing you can think to do with it is advertise for laundry detergent and try to displace workers.

We have put the least imaginative people alive in charge of the world.

How long until advertisement impacts chatgpt answer, I mean not just adding a sponsored link at the end but changing it's answer.

We've seen it with Google, money is too hard to resist. Enshitification is coming !

Thanks god for the open Chinese models, they are the future. All hail the CCP.

And so begins the enshittification.

I hope my comment ages like unpasteurized milk on a hot summer day, but I’m afraid it will age like an sp3 hybridized allotrope of carbon.

Glad I made the right decision divesting from ChatGPT + OpenAI.

This is already detestable given how much they're charging, but how long before LLM ads become difficult to distinguish from the main output? Remember how Google ads started out? And for all their faults, Google _after_ 20 years of maximizing-shareholder-value disease is a far more trustworthy company than OpenAI _today_. How long do you trust the ethical instincts of the OpenAI leadership to leave money on the table?

Aaaand... it's not available in your country. Only available in: Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, United Kingdom, United States.

Which accounts to approximately 8.02% of the global population. Or 37.9% of world nominal GDP. Based on ChatGPT.

Slippery slope ...

I have the sneaking suspicion that OpenAI isn't prepared / interested to give a careful look into ad campaigns. Any bets on fucked up ads taking advantage of the convo context? I'm thinking:

- financial anxiety + kelshi

- random cooking question + galaxy gas

- suicidal thoughts + shotgun

Model steering?

"relevant ads that fit naturally into the experience"

They took that from Google!

Aka acceptable ads.

Funny how they always drive and thrive on pestering people.

Just upgraded to their 100$ plans. Time to reconsider.

Mark your calendar. When the next generation asks, you can tell them it was today when the AI enshittification era truly began.

It begins.

Cool, so now that open weight models are closing in on SOTA, SOTA enshittifies.

Now for the crash

ChatGPT has replaced 90% of Google for me ... that is another 1T source of income for OpenAI

Well. that's going to cause hilarious results in all those unchecked spam bots & slop sites.

Next up: upgrade to Pro to disable memory.

How unfortunate - I’d rather work with a lesser model than put up with bullshit ads

I finally freed myself from Google using Kagi instead

I don’t currently use OpenAI but if Claude pulls this shit too I’ll have a problem on my hands

Coming soon: advertise in local event slop posters!

Is this a new record for enshittification?

>with relevant ads that fit naturally into the experience

Funny, all the ads I've seen so far are so unrelated to my chat query that is laughable.

I thought it was random placement, but if there was supposed to be an effort behind that ... damn, quite an incompetent team.

Edit: And here come the downvotes from the OpenAI bots/lovers.

So the ads are going to stay separate from the chat itself... For now ;) then they'll start playing by Google's playbook

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The same people that ruined Meta are now the same people at OpenAI are going to place ads there.

This surely is saving the world and benefiting humanity. /s

But almost certainly someone somewhere is building an ad-blocker to rid of the ads. We'll see.

very cool