Yes you can. This is how Meta, Google et al report their numbers. Obviously I'm not expecting each user to bring in exactly $8. The point is that the value they need to extract from their free users to be profitable is very small and very achievable. You and many people here have completely incorrect notions on how expensive inference is. Inference is cheap, and has been for some time now.
>and advertising revenue is directly tied to amount of usage.
Open AI with 800M weekly active users processes 2.6B messages per day. Google with ~5 billion users processes ~14 billion searches per day.
>This too is skewed by averaging with users who barely use the service.
No it's not. Inference is just not that expensive. Model costs have literally crashed several orders of magnitudes in the last few years. Sure, in 2020, this would be a very serious concern. In 2025, it just isn't.
> No it's not.
If you add a pile of fictious users to the usercount, the apparent average cost-per-user drops as the fictious users do not use the service and do not add their own costs. This lowers the apparent amount of per-user revenue you need.
However, as fictious users also do not generate revenue, this is all smoke and mirrors.
Again, yes you can if you're simply trying to see the relative level of value you need to extract from your users. It's not a complicated idea. $8 is far far below what Google, Meta report. You were wrong. It's not a high bar. End of story.
>If you add a pile of fictious users to the usercount,
As always, nonsensical hypotheticals are just that. Nonsensical.
Ad-supported LLM Chatbots will be one of the most lucrative businesses ever.
[0] https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-ch...
> To make ChatGPT work as a search engine requires all the infrastructure of a search engine. Ipso-facto they are always more expensive than a standalone search engine.
These LLM search products run a search engine query in the background.
As for your source, I will call you out on one thing:
> First, there's not that much motive to gain API market share with unsustainably cheap prices.
The motive would be the hundreds of billions in deals that OpenAI has been making off the back of their marketshare.
I see this site is still Retard News.
Especially because OpenAI highly inflates user figures.
> It's not orders of magnitudes more expensive
This too is skewed by averaging with users who barely use the service.