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

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.

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.

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.

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 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?

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Crazy idea: charge money.

They're not running a charity

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Yes, which is fine

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This seems simple - it makes the experience worse.

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.

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.

I hate shallow confident people.

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

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.

The mental gymnastics required to justify ads always gets me.

They make your experience worse in every possible way.