I have never seen a service/industry move from ads to subscription. People will watch as many ads as you throw at them to avoid paying.
For example, even though youtube keeps increasing ads to an annoying level, vast majority of public is willing to grovel through that rather than pay for it. What evidence do you have that makes you think that that will change?
Please don't get me wrong. I admire someone creating a new and different search engine but if you keep growing in size, I believe you will face the same pressures that google/bing/etc faced and go the same route they did. "The king is dead, long live the king" scenario.
PS : remember larry and sergey warned about advertising incentives in their research paper as well but once you see the 9-10-11-12 digit figures on a piece of paper, idealistic morality usually goes out the window.
Ofc this is just my "educated guess at best, speculation at worst". I have a lot less information than you in this field.
But ad-free search products like the one Kagi is building are able to offer much more value and features than their ad-supported counterparts (which are inherinetly restricted by the nature of the business model and their customer being different than their user).
To be clear, I do not think that in two or even five years paid search will rule the world in a way that ad-supported search does now, but I think that enough people will realize that access to information that has only their best interest in mind will make them more productive and competitive in the future world, and make paying for search a much more viable option than today.
Have more thoughts about this in "The age of pagerank is over" blog post if you want to spare a moment. [1]
and there are 2.5 billion monthly active users on Youtube, according to [0].
So about 1% of the userbase are willing to pay for ad-free content.
[0] https://www.globalmediainsight.com/blog/youtube-users-statis...
Seeing social media, for example, go from "fun way to catch up with friends and family" to "pump ads, FUD and FOMO to our users as efficiently and accurately as possible, 24x7x365" has been an incredibly sad experience.
Seeing Google go from "I can type a question and find what I'm looking for" to "I have to append site:reddit.com to every query to avoid SEO-optimized puff pieces because Google can't be trusted" is disheartening.
I really hate having to be so overly aggressive in blocking ads and trackers on my devices because collecting this telemetry is the only way for many Internet companies to survive these days.
It doesn't help that talking about this with non-Internet-savvy people who were hoodwinked into the status quo makes me sound like a stereotypical doomsday cult subscriber.
I really hope the rest of the world agrees with the future you're describing here, Vlad.
Thank you so much for writing this. I'm proud to help support your mission in fixing the Internet.
Even they are moving towards ad now.
No. The commenter you replied to is actually a time traveler sent back from 2025.
HERE BE SOMEONE WITH MONEY
iPhone users are a perfect example of this.
Generative content sprinkled here and there but majority of results still being genuine human created content.
I don’t see MSFT being a player here. Their ML talent is shallow, their search team is tiny compared to Google and a partnership with a startup won’t change that
I think AI is overhyped right now. Very few real businesses being built on GPT outside of copywriting and blog spam, and consumer toys (avatars, art, funny filters).
I also think Google knows it’s not as disruptive as people think it is.
It will help you surface information faster.
in 2 years i will just run local llm and not touch google/microsoft models with a ten foot pole
the internet will be full of generated garbage and rendered useless
We will be at the end of the AI hype cycle we are currently in. Majority of AI/search startups that exist today will no longer be around, failing to find a viable business model that has a hope of profitability, as stuffing ads inside will put them in direct trajectory of Google/Microsoft insane resources.
Google and Microsoft situation will be much better defined. One of these companies will discover that being open to developers is a strategic advantage. Ad-supported search as a model will fail to find ground in AI answers. Both companies will inject so many ads in AI chat answers to pay for the bills, that users who previously didn't mind ads (or had ways to block them), will finally start looking for ad-free search alternatives.
This will finally allow large scale prolifiration of a new breed of search products offering search experiences made for users instead of advertisers. Paying for search will become much more common and we will be slowly exiting the 25 years Matrix-like coma situation we are currently held in, where the expectation for the most valuable and intimate thing we do online (search and browsing) is to be free, while we accept to surrender our private information, time and attention in return.
The alignment of incentives in combination with enough resources and the newest techonlgoies will finally allow for truly amazing innovation in search, changing the way we consume information forever.
So when I think about Kagi's trajectory, it is surviving the next two years and keeping on innovating that matters. The business model is already sound and future-proof (the price will come down too).