ChatGPT's ads have the industry excited, but insiders are frustrated

[rcjordan]

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/20/chatgpt-ads-testing-openai.html

[Brad]

It will be interesting how long before these all turn into "an ad infested flow" and if Joe Average will even be able to tell what is an ad and what isn't.  Greed has no limits.

[littleman]

I suspect all the major AI streams will eventually enshitify as they struggle to profit.  Why would it be any different than everything else on the net?

[ergophobe]

Why would it be any different than everything else on the net?

If we were placing bets, I would give you 999:1 odds of being right. The thing that utterly dashes my hope is this new announcement from ChatGPT

The thing that gives me a glimmer of hope is that search and social media committed the original sin of positioning themselves as free products. Once people expect something to be free, it is really hard to get them to pay.

Thus far, AI has always been a paid product with limited free access. If you are even a modest user, you get shut down and told to pay up.

Subscription-supported vs ad-supported does not stop enshittification entirely, but if I compare Netflix or Streak CRM (that I pay for) to Amazon and Google, the enshittification levels are just not comparable. In fact, Streak is 100% not enshittified so far and I've been using it for years. In general, I don't think Airbnb has enshittified over time -- some good, some bad, but mostly improvements.

Even if I compare free Google (search, Gmail, maps) with paid Google (Workspace), it's hugely different. I do not find Workspace has enshittified at all over the 15 years I've had it.

Workspace was originally free with your own domain. For a long time they grandfathered me in, then charged me $2/month. Now I pay $8.40 and my wife pays $12 for an upgraded account. I genuinely like it. I prefer Sheets to Excel. I love how easy it is to pull data from one sheet to another and massage it with some fairly complex formulas.

If my only experience with Google was Workspace, I would actually have mostly warm feelings about the company.

So there are other paths.

But then I looked at what it would take to replace Google Search's ad-based revenue with subscription revenue.

I thought, "We could have disenshittified Google Search if everyone paid $20/month." Then I looked at the numbers are realized that isn't even close to true.

Google Search makes $175b per year.

If you put a paywall up, you would lose 99% to Bing. But let's be generous and say that 10% will actually pay for Google search like I pay for Netflix or Streak.

175,000,000,000/(12*20) = 729,166,666 subscribers needed to hit that revenue. That is more than 2X what Netflix has and Netflix has a lower price point (including the enshittified $7.95 + ads level).

Conclusion: we are probably doomed.

On the other hand, streaming has divided somewhat into services like Amazon and Netflix that have ad-infested enshittified versions and AppleTV or Paramount who, so far, just have subscriber services, no ads.