We're experimenting with advertising | Hacker News Reader

We're experimenting with advertising

perplexity.ai

68 pointsspeckx106 comments

The incentive to sell something completely undermines the ability to give you the best information. Floating sponsored links to the top is one thing but telling an AI this is the link the user should click is going to ruin the whole thing.

Just wait until we have AI agents finding optimizing for click through rates.

That will free up the best technical minds of our generation to apply themselves to some _other_ socially useless application.

It is already happening outside of LLMs. It is just so sophisticated that we don't notice it.

Actually, you can already notice it in many news sites. The either provide different titles for different userbases/ or change it globally few times for everyone and then they settle for the title which got the most clicks. I am confident that the title content is not managed by the human anymore. Just reviewed.

we have that. it’s called ads

> ... we want to highlight our guiding principle: the content of the answers you receive on Perplexity will not be influenced by advertisers ... Ads will appear in the US to start and will be formatted as sponsored follow-up questions and paid media positioned to the side of an answer.

Isn't masquerading sponsored follow-up question a loophole around the "guiding principle" of not wanting to influence the user here? I must say though, there's no easy way out for pplx since ads, by definition, compete for user's attention (and an unrelated / unobtrusive sponsor link / question / reference would be no good for the sponsor; which is to say, the sponsor is pplx's customer, not the end-user).

I don't see how this won't eventually converge towards some kind of AI-optimized SEO; presumably there's some algorithm which surfaces sponsored follow-up questions for a given query?

This is what Google did. Even if you technically don't manipulate the search results around sponsorships, you can devote more and more real estate to the sponsored results, and gradually make the distinction between sponsored and normal results less visually apparent.

Google search has essentially been eaten by its own ad-based funding model, but I'm sure they made a ton of money on it up to this point.

every business is trying to sell you something. or make money off you somehow. doesnt necessarily mean its a bad thing, in fact you could think of it like a service we want and willingly pay for.

But not every business finds it usefulness gradually eroded by its revenue model.

I remember a time when ads were clearly on the sidebar of Google's search results so users wouldn't mix them up with the actual search results and unintentionally click them.

Then somebody at Google realized that if they moved the search results into the middle of the search result, then a lot more users would mix them up with the search results and click them. I'm sure it increased click-though rates by a lot.

Yeah, and pair this dynamic with the need for ever-increasing returns, you have just derived the primary driver of enshittification

It also looks very much like what Google said about ads in their initial paper...

Also I don't see any excemption for pro users. They must be joking if they think I want to pay for a service that delivers ads too.

> Also I don't see any excemption for pro users. They must be joking if they think I want to pay for a service that delivers ads too.

You might not want to, but you will. If the offered service is better than others.

Having some follow up questions designed to promote particular services actually can be OK. I regularly use pplx, but the follow ups tend to have a lot to be desired anyway, as much of the time they're just a rewording of a previous question, and I do at times get to the point where I'm looking for recommendations.

I've subscribed to Perplexity for the past 2 years. ChatGPT search is on par if not better in some respect but I use Perplexity enough to justify the $240 a year still (and inertia). However, if they start pushing ads on Pros subscribers I'm out.

The service has really taken a worse in the past couple of months. Bugs are creeping up more and more, suggestions from the community are getting ignored, removing popular models (e.g. Claude Opus), the interface has stagnated etc.

Insane to pay that amount from what I seen. I had a free 6 months trial and got almost no value from it tbh

I call time-out, exodus, boycott, I mean, when do we stop following these companies down the garden path.

"We weren't making enough money, so we have to destroy any good in the service we were providing and hope that enough people are apathetic enough to accept that shit and that we make more profit?" -- that's not your only option!

Anyway, this is hot air, the problem stems from the structure of the internet, and the answer is in new types of networks with different rules. GNUnet, Freenet, IPFS, Autonomi, something else, there's loads of effort going into it. I hope something compelling emerges soon.

Fucking gross. The industrial advertising complex needs to die.

Advertising supported business models are the root of so many of our problems. It's turned news into ragebait political bubble machines. It's why we have an epidemic of screen addiction and social isolation. They spy on us and sell our weaknesses to the highest bidder. Drug companies literally spend more on advertising than actually developing drugs. Billboards clutter up the landscapes and digital ads litter all our screens.

It is a blight on humanity and future generations are going to look back on us with the deepest pity on how we voluntarily did this to ourselves just to not pay for anything (directly).

It's not going anywhere without being legally banished, and of the two major parties in the US, one is fairly pro-corporate and the other is anti-regulation. I don't think there's going to be improvement here in the US in the near future. But I do think advertising should be almost entirely disallowed.

> It's why we have an epidemic of screen addiction and social isolation.

Advertising isn't why this happens. Massive greed, immoral behavior, and natural human behavior to be entertained and distracted is why you get screen addiction. Netflix changing it's model to ads based is because they make more money that way, not because viewers get more addicted from ads. Meta makes an absurd profit every quarter but two years from now they'll inject more ads into your feed to make more profit.

Corporations have record profits and record stock prices, and then fire thousands of people only to get rewarded with their stock price going up. The entire system is just set up wrong.

And IMO Perplexity is fucking gross way more than advertising.

Ads kind of are the reason though. Algorithmic feeds are found in every social media product because they create nearly infinite ad space "inventory". If your feed was limited to stuff people you know post you could spend an hour, read it all, and be done for a while. But if you're not "engaged" you're not viewing ads.

Metrics like "eyeballs" and "engagement" are important to social media products because they're proxies for the quality and quantity of ad space inventory you can sell to advertisers.

Good to see it stated so clearly! I don't know if I agree that we "voluntarily" did it, it seems like more of a situation where you give people one option and say "pick". We are at fault for not saying "no", though. But otherwise, straight down the line.

1. Rewrite someone's copyright content. 2. Put Ads. 3. Profit.

I'm highly skeptical they'll step away from this approach once it becomes a core part of their business metrics. With VCs pushing for higher growth, resources and new outside hires will inevitably be directed to fuel it. Eventually, growth through ads will become embedded in their culture.

theyve already partnered with aws. i mean every online company works through ads if not direct purchase/subscription. its just the only revenue model that works. unless every user purchases pro how else would they make money? sell perplex t-shirts? its obviously a costy product to maintain. and if your not going to pay cash for a product then whats the only other revenue system that you will tolerate? its ads. everyone is fine with it in actuality but act like they arent. thats the funny part. vote with wallet, they will comply

That's why I do want everything open ; in the end these companies will end up like all of them. Pay per month, still get ads, service declining and that until they disappear. It seems with Qwen en Llama and cheap storage, we can build similar experiences already/soon.

All the VC money is pumping to make it a profit. Being just an ai agent should be enough to cover with subscription revenue otherwise

These LLM companies have never been profitable, and most of them will die before they achieve profitability.

I started using Perplexity as my primary information-finding tool because of the progressive worsening of Google search results.

Philosophically Kagi resonated with me, but Perplexity just gave me better results and it won out. This move into an ad-driven-revenue model may tip the scales back in Kagi's favor.

For those that aren't aware, (part of)the Kagi hypothesis is ad-driven-revenue ultimately leads to enshittification, and that the solution is a subscription model. I don't question the first part of this hypothesis(ads -> enshit.). But the second depends on many factors. In this particular case, how long does the enshittification take? What if we just move to a world where every 10-20 years, there is a new VC-subsidized but ultimately ad-funded organization that kills the previous incumbent? And we just jump from ship to ship, never realizing the cycle we are in because it takes 10-20 years for the ad model to rot at the core of the product.

To be fair, that first part is not just a Kagi hypothesis - they literally quote Brin & Page on this:

"The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users... advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."

— The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998

As far as the model, I think the problem is that once ads are shown to be profitable, they become pervasive in anything mainstream, because, well, why would VCs back a startup that is not willing to take money that's on the table? There's a niche in catering to people who really, really hate the notion of targeted ads and the associated infringement of their privacy, which makes Kagi viable, but I don't see any major ad-free competition in this space. So I doubt that it can work as a cycle. We might get a competitor that works better than Google - it's not exactly a high bar these days! - to replace them eventually, but I'm pretty sure it'll also be ad-ridden. And with LLMs especially, the potential for replacing in-your-face ads with subtle but persistent bias in the desired direction can make it all much worse.

Asking for feedback from the community but not directly indicating how this feedback can be submitted sounds to me insincere and probably just PR speech.

God it's so obvious how they're running out of money with nothing really to show for it, these are gigantic red warning signs of the bubble getting close to bursting, another is how Microsoft released Warcraft 3 reforged 2.0 with literally every asset upressed by AI, they're trying to justify the amount of money thrown into the dumpster to AI by doing these things.

And so it begins.

Ha! That’s what Google said to themselves when they were getting started with ads. It’s a way for us to sustain our business but not compromise on our principles.

Give it a few more years, every company needs to show ARR growth. How are you going to show that growth without resorting to ads in search results?

Dear Perplexity,

We've seen this all before. We know what VC funding inevitably leads to, and we know what Enshittification is. You're just too late to the game.

They have to do something especially with the deployment of ChatGPT search.

Crazy idea: charge money.

And then, big surprise, still show ads but just call them differently like promotions or partnerships! Can I collect my MBA now?

If one of the most important innovations in tech in recent times cannot support itself without ads what is the future of tech (and why?)

(We want money)

They're not running a charity

We don't want to pay with our attention.

Then pay with your wallet.

That's not always an accepted payment method.

It is here: https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/faq/what-is-perplexity-pro

It doesn't say there are no ads.

Are they still charging 5x per click compared to the real search engines?

And that's how it all starts...

Is this limited to non-pro accounts?

That's the question and since they didn't explicitly mentioned that in the post I assume that it will be shown to the pro accounts too. You pay 20$ for the "pro-search", but not for ad-free experience.

Originally, Perplexity advertised itself as being the ad-free alternative to Google search. Now they switch to an ad-based model. Unsurprising.

The grift continues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Well, here we go. Will be interesting to see how "enshittification" of AI products plays out compared to Web 2.0.

Enshittification begins.

Enshittificaiton begins!

Somehow everyone learned about this word in the past two years and now it's been so overused that it's getting boring to always shout it as soon as something changes.

Happens to every new word that becomes popular on the internet.

I understand getting bored of it, but it's only been "overused" because it's the same pattern everywhere since the beginning of this decade.

In the last few years, a lot of companies went down the anti-consumer road: shrinkflation, lower quality/reliable parts, and just like Perplexity, forced ads in paid subscriptions for Netflix/Prime Video/etc. So I think it very much applies in this case.

> now it's been so overused

Is it actually overused or are you just tired of being reminded that so many things are constantly getting objectively worse?

We finally have a word for what capitalism eventually leads to. In a few years economics textbooks will be full of it.

It's such a common pattern in technology - especially in VC-funded companies - that it's nice to have a single word to be able to discuss it concisely. In a way it's not too different than old-school "dumping" of products at below cost to drive competition out of business only to raise prices once you have control of the market. Though with internet companies the "price" is often the volume of ads you end up getting exposed to.

tl;dr people are not inclined to pay for search, so Perplexity's hand was forced?

I believe that many are willing to pay if the results are good enough when compared to free alternatives.

However, as many studies show in Youtube/Meta/GoogleSearch ad revenue per user, the subscription price needs to be really high to match the ad profits.

If you want to maximize the profits, you include ads.

Yes, which is fine

I paid for Perplexity Pro for a while. It was somewhat useful for researching technical articles. But I found it got too much wrong in areas I knew about, so I couldn't trust it in areas I didn't. If I have to double check what it tells me, I might as well use a search engine, so I moved that spending to Kagi.

I pay and I don't see an excemption for pro accounts.

I am already pretty pissed at them for pushing the election widget so hard - you could click on the X, but it would come back on every new search I opened.

Why are people so negative about ads?

Just don't click them, this and tons of other services wouldn't exist without revenue streams...

EDIT: Based on the tsunami of responses, perhaps a hybrid offering with a paid ad-free version? Even then they would only be building a single product so directional conflict would still arise..

This seems simple - it makes the experience worse.

People don't want to understand that someone has to pay for all that bandwidth and free compute.

I'm using Kagi for that reason, just like I'm using Fastmail. I give someone money, they give me a service and support if needed. Seems fair and simple.

When the internet started it was weird to pay for something ephemeral like certain bits being delivered to you. But totally normal to pay for magazines. I think that early mindset just continued and became the new default. Electronic media just feels weird to pay for for people.

> Electronic media just feels weird to pay for for people.

Most people in the target audience of Perplexity probably pay for at least two streaming services (Spotify, Netflix etc.), so I don't think it's about "eletronic media" but more that search seems like a simple thing from the outside that always has been free and has a very strong player that offers a pretty good service for most people.

By the end magazines were mostly ads and almost free to subscribe to.

are you joking? advertising is - by definition - that thing made to wash your brain to make you desire things it you originally wasn't interested to.

Advertising is showing you products and services that exist. What you're thinking of is marketing.

I can't really see a difference between advertising and marketing

I just told you.

> Advertising is showing you products and services that exist.

If advertising actually stopped there, I would have no objection against it.

Villiam, for some reason I can't respond to one of your old posts about the Velumount device. May I email you about that?

Sure, it's viliam at bur dot sk.

Seeing ads can still affect you psychologically even if you don't click them.

Also lots of ads prey on people with worse impulse control who bankroll the rest of us who don't click ads. Similar to how casinos are bankrolled by the addicts at the slot machines or many games are bankrolled by the addicts spending all their savings on in game items.

Doesn't make me feel warm and fuzzy.

Plus there's something just aesthetically pleasing about an ad-free experience. I started paying for youtube premium to avoid ads and I must say its a much nicer experience.

> Also lots of ads prey on people with worse impulse control who bankroll the rest of us who don't click ads.

This reminds me of the Mark Twain adage of "Telling a man he can't have steak just because a baby can't chew it."

I don't want to pay money & subscriptions to every site I visit because some folks don't have impulse control. Similarly, the prevalence of alcoholism in society shouldn't prevent me from having a glass of wine with dinner.

> I don't want to pay money & subscriptions to every site I visit because some folks don't have impulse control.

I have bad news for you: the absolutely infinite capacity for greed and the subsequent enshittification means that you're going to pay a subscription fee and still get to have your brain pickled by ad-based propaganda, just like cable TV.

> I don't want to pay money & subscriptions to every site I visit because some folks don't have impulse control.

You've got it exactly backwards. The reason you don't have to pay subscriptions is because of people with poor impulse control. If ads were less effective (e.g. the low impulse control people didn't exit), more sites would require subscriptions because the ad inventory would not be able to cover costs.

I hate shallow confident people.

Successive new major leaps in technology (concurrent with a dying culture of consumer protection) lead to qualitatively worse advertising experiences.

We're going from skippable ads (cable/DVR) to unskippable ads with surveillance (streaming) to algorithmic output/content that can be influenced by advertising with no transparency or disclosure.

How were cable ads skippable? I guess you could change the channel?

You can fast-forward with a DVR.

You obviously didn't grow up in the 80s or 90s.

If a company is paying $1 to advertise to you, they are making more than $1 from you in profit

You pay for it anyway. The ones that really pay are the ones who think they are immune to the brainwashing of a trillion dollar industry.

The presence of ads always degrades whatever they're attached to and are a visible indicator that you're being tracked.

But, even worse than that, when a company becomes dependent on ad revenue, then that company will always, sooner or later, start prioritizing the interests of ad companies over those of their users.

These are the reasons why I shy away from ad-supported products and services if at all possible. I prefer to use products and services that are optimized for users rather than advertisers.

Why I don’t like ads:

1. Fundamentally propaganda with little real regulatory oversight. Numerous arguments to this point and the negative impact of advertising have been made in the last several decades.

2. Tech companies seem to eventually get into the business of selling data and/or manipulating the user experience to better suit advertisement. I can’t think of a single company that has adopted advertising and not scaled it over time.

3. Security and privacy concerns inherent with letting third parties manipulate page content.

I would allow ads if I could absolutely be assured that malware won't be served to me through them. I'm not talking about something that requires clicking on the ad themselves, because I never click on ads. I'm talking about malicious code being executed as soon as the ad is served. I know that Google is doing everything they can to try and prevent this but I don't trust that this is a solved problem.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-abuse...

https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6020954?hl=en

Ad creatives could be 10x better, but nobody allocates the budget for it.

For ads to be effective, they need to be targeted. Any ad-supported model incentivizes identifying and tracking users across as many services as possible and data mining to build profiles.

Bitter experience.

Every time ads are allowed in, the quality degrades — products and services can be optimised for solving problems, or for ongoing revenue, but not both.

The latter comes at the expense of the former, it doesn't enable the former.

Lots of websites are basically unusable without an adblocker, being mostly advertising and hardly any content; it's not quite that bad with YouTube yet, but getting there.

Most forms of advertisement should be considered criminal, as most modern ads are borderline psychological warfare against a population that doesn't even understand they're at war and losing because the effects aren't immediately noticeable and are very rarely directly physical.

Tear down someone mentally until you can get them to agree to part with their money. Call them ugly, call them fat, call them depressed. Show them how boring and miserable their life is before <product> is a part of their life. But only ever indirectly - if you're too direct the negative emotions they're feeling will be associated with your product instead of themselves. Tease them with beautiful people having fun and enjoying life. This could be you if you buy <product>. Happy and successful. Surrounded by friends laughing and smiling. Remember - ending on a happy emotion makes people associate those feelings with <product> which will increase sales of <product>. Cute polar bears. Drink coke.

It's a form of assault and I refuse to pretend otherwise.

so you believe if your teacher or parent tell you not to over eat sugars, not to drop out of school, take care of looks, because these things will prevent you from being rich, relationship, comfort.

you believe this type of messaging shouldnt be shown because we are too mentally weak to handle it? you dont believe parents should parent their child either? you think anything that can possibly make a human form an opinion is inherently evil? do you think a company that lets say shows how boring your life is so they try to sell you a book is wrong. or a workout machine shouldnt show what it can potentially offer to your life. or basically extending your life. a school that sells prestige and highest level of education should instead never advertise so you dont feel dumb?

im not saying this is the ideal utopia. this is reality. for businesses to work they need money, for a country to prosper it needs successful businesses whether it be govt or otherwise. you want to teach kids to be able to handle reality not play victim. ofc this is just my way of seeing things. but i believe being able to use what is being offered to your advantage is what makes successful people. and ill be damned if someone in the states believes they dont have all the opportunities in the world with the most access to whatever they want with govt regulating the things you are so afraid of to at least a reasonable level. being able to identify the evil in everything thus shutting themselves off is counter productive imo and its honestly even a blessing to be able to think like this lol. many countries this cant even be a factor because these companies cant even exsist to give you these evil messages. because they dont survive in those small economies

There are literally hundreds if not thousands of studies about precisely how to navigate people in aggregate and take advantage of every little bit of human psychology to maximize profits. It's not about people being mentally weak but about corporations and marketers knowing how to best break past people's mental barriers.

You are not unique among the millions of people. Advertising works - and it also works on people who adamantly believe that it doesn't work on them. Often because people think of themselves are more intelligent than the average person.

Almost nobody claims to like advertising. They might prefer advertising over subscriptions as a form of payment - but not because they like ads but because it doesn't take money from them directly but rather indirectly. Yet despite the almost universal hatred of advertisements its the worlds largest business.

Advertising would not be in the top 10 of worlds largest businesses if it didn't work on hundreds of millions of people. It bears repeating. You are not special. Neither am I. Despite my best attempts at avoiding advertising I can nearly guarantee it affects my purchasing decisions perhaps without my awareness of it at all. Subconsciously there like a parasite. Because that's how advertising actually works.

Nobody sees an ad and goes "I want <ad product>". That's not how advertising actually works but it's how people think it works. 3 months down the line you're buying beer for a party and buy a pack of Heineken without thinking too much about it. And that is when they have won.

Your criticism seems to be less about ads but rather about certain products and services that use ads for distribution and their messaging.

There are very few forms of advertisement that I don't have a major problem with. Public space bulletin boards, word of mouth (non-sponsored), dedicated infomercial spaces (no videomercials w/ the comedy-like over the top failing at life to try and sell the product).

Price, product/service, why you need it and why yours over any competitors. Non-targeted ads by default unless the user opts in for targeted ads.

Mom & pop shops are totally capable of emotion-targeted advertising and it's a problem when they do it too. Corporations just use it more.

For example - how does one advertise perfume over television? A product that requires you to smell it? Emotional manipulation and promise of fantasy. Nothing to do with perfume. A proper commercial would at least try to explain the smell - maybe mention the high/low note fragrances used. Nope. Beautiful models. Lavish party. Brand name.

Fixing advertising will never happen. Advertising runs the world because it already won the war.

Before ads, the service has one clear goal - build the best product they can for their users.

After ads, the goal is less clear. They still need to please users, but they also have to please advertisers. The needs of users and advertisers aren't always going to be aligned, and so users should lose trust in the Perplexity results.

If I was an investor, this would make me nervous. Make something that is far better than your competitors and users will pay. If you make something that is only marginally better than your competitors, users are only going to pay at most, a marginal fee. Perplexity is signaling that their product is mediocre.

I have a 1 year subscription to the pro plan that I got for free. Unless it gets way better, I won't pay for the next year.

I do pay for Claude and think it's easily worth the $20 / month.

> the service has one clear goal - build the best product they can for their users.

I don't believe this in the case of anything funded with big VC money. But let's say that Perplexity is trying to build the best product they can. They are scraping content and selling (or giving it) to their users, but at whose expense? Users get a convenient search engine and content makers get their work scraped. But now Perpelixity will let content makers pay them money so they can get traffic back to their site. This is kind of just the internet services 30 year timeline on a speedrun.

There's almost nothing unique about HN as a tech news site these days. Sure you occasionally get a deep SME on the occasional deeply technical article, but the comment gravity on this website at this point is largely centered around tech-adjacent topics like this (business practices, regulations, legal action, social implications of tech.)

At this point the only thing that makes HN different from another subreddit or X or Bluesky is that the userbase values privacy highly, hates advertising, has an affinity for open software, and some other largely cultural values. If you're still using HN as a generic "high discussion quality tech news site" I think it's time to change that expectation. If you want to ask a site whose culture has evolved to hate advertising why they hate advertising, it's sort of like going to a watermelon-haters club and asking them why they hate watermelons so much.

The mental gymnastics required to justify ads always gets me.

They make your experience worse in every possible way.

Simple response. Never have I experienced a "thing" (web site, app, entertainment media, etc..) that did not have ads and thought, "You know what, this would be better with ads". Additionally, never have I experienced a "thing" that has ads and thought, "These ads are really making the experience better."

Ads ruin everything they touch. They make every experience worse. Anything + ads is a worse experience for everyone than that thing without ads.

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