The advertising angle is significantly overrated. Theres only so many ad dollars to go around and so every dollar they make they have to take from so other player like Google. With Google having decent AI search now for free OpenAI is already well behind here.

Users coming from Chat or Claude or the likes would be very high intent if done correctly, advertisers would pay a lot of money. I'm certain people would pull budget from Google.

But Google has chat too now plus a ton more data about users OpenAI doesn’t have. There really isn’t anything OpenAI can do that Google isn’t also already doing.

Honestly if ads start getting put into chats that service is dead to me

Useless stat without breakdown of time spent at the site and bot activity.

It will draw a non-zero number just curious people who never use ChatGPT.

And bots are exfiltrating model knowledge for the benefit of competition.

There are only so many ad dollars to go around. ChatGPT getting traffic doesn't mean they can convince ad buyers that their dollar goes further than at established players like Google and Meta. AI search is a commodity at this point, even DuckDuckGo has it.

Reddit has been one of the world's top websites for over a decade, yet they are totally irrelevant in terms of ad product market share.

Because reddit users are low quality users. Meta and Google can peak into your data and segment you to sell.

ChatGPT ads are low quality placed at the bottom barely noticed.

ChatGPT ads will get better. Meta's social userbase is drying up. Google keeps introducing and removing things from chrome to keep access to spy on you for them alone. We'll see how things pan out but in ten more years reddit ads will still be worthless.

I think a lot of money and effort is spent on advertising on reddit. It just goes to astroturfing instead of paying Reddit.