Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmer | Hacker News Reader

Same here. I was a customer for a long time and loved the service, but having to watch my “search spend” and constantly going over limits is really annoying. I ended up cancelling but I really wish I didn’t.

Personally I’d like to see an ad-supported, or partially ad-supported version that isn’t evil.

The way Google started out with relevant ads in the sidebar or a single relevant ad at the top is acceptable in my opinion if it means bring the cost way down for the end user and ensuring sustainability for the company.

I don’t think asking users to shell out $10, $20, $30 per month for search is a viable long term model that’ll ever appeal to the masses.

View on HN

I'm not a Kagi user (yet) but I think you're missing the point.

In order to display just one ad, the engine has to start tracking you. The converse, just display a random ad, is not valuable to advertizers and they won't pay for it.

Equally, the kagi user base is so small that even if I -wanted- to put an ad on Kagi, I'd get very few impressions per month.

Lastly given that the user base is self-selecting as a group paying money not to see ads, my ads will likely get no clicks.

Thus, imo, you can be subscription supported, or ad supported but not both.

>In order to display just one ad, the engine has to start tracking you.

I don't think so. Selling ads based on keywords in search terms has always been a viable strategy.

But you're right about Kagi's current user base. Selling yourself as an ad-free alternative and then introducing ads sounds difficult to say the least.

> In order to display just one ad, the engine has to start tracking you.

They most certainly do not. Ads can be contextual for the search like AdWords was. Instead of selling their users they could sell their content.

At least you'd want to track user language. There are many words that are spelled the same in different languages but have completely different meanings. Just one example.

It's probably not possible to be both ad supported and not evil. They are at odds with each other.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com