Comment by holden_nelson
2 days ago
> OpenAI is facing off against Google, Meta and Amazon, all of which have existing relationships with advertisers.
I will point out that these companies have existing relationships with advertisers because they have massive, sticky userbases and advanced targeting tools. The average consumer is absolutely using ChatGPT for personal use, and maybe Copilot at work if applicable. And they're using Google's AI by proxy when they perform searches.
If OpenAI were to roll out advertising tooling, I have no doubt advertisers would flock there to try it out.
Additionally, the other thing I think OpenAI leads in is Product. Google is amazing at creating technologies and awful at creating products. I think OpenAI can be positioned to win based off of that alone.
> . The average consumer is absolutely using ChatGPT for personal use
In my experience the "average consumer" isn't doing anything with ChatGPT except maybe play with it for a little bit before getting bored. They actively avoid AI when the apps and products they use try to shove it down their throats and they search the internet and ask their tech savvy family members for ways to disable AI in their stuff when they see it nag at them about using it.
Inevitably, AI ends up being used by people in some ways (like the AI reply at the top of every google search) but almost never because the average consumer asked for that or wanted it. It's a toy when they want to use it, and annoying when they don't but are forced to.
Eh I definitely agree this archetype is real but I disagree that it’s the one that constitutes the average consumer. My dad is a carpenter and my mom is a nurse. My wife is a hairstylist. None are particularly tech savvy. All three use ChatGPT quite a bit. Stuff they would previously google. How do I make an apple pie? Should I see a doctor? Stuff like that.
As another commenter stated, ChatGPT has over 700 million WAU. There are only 4.4 million SWEs in the US. I think it’s caught on
But they have 700million WAUs?
Yeah, but the report citing that number doesn't make clear how they calculate that. But maybe that's just a failure of my comprehension though I know some people like to spin words. So is 700 million unique users each week? Or is 700 million unique users that were active in A week, but not necessarily the same week, as in a creative way of saying weekly instead of monthly? The report simply states "in September of 2025", but September isn't a week. Or is it not even unique but simply distinct users in a week. Would the same person on Monday and Tuesday be 2? Or even Monday morning and night? Or any different session. The report citing the 700 million specifically seems to leave out word unique which is pretty key to any meaningful statement on visitor usage.
They go a bit more detailed in the end to say 2.5 billion messages a day.
> Additionally, the other thing I think OpenAI leads in is Product. Google is amazing at creating technologies and awful at creating products. I think OpenAI can be positioned to win based off of that alone.
I agree that Google isn't great at creating products anymore, but I'm not sure that OpenAI is. We've seen relatively simple products by them (a chat app, a short-form video app, various web interfaces) but we haven't seen anything as complex as some of Google's bigger products (Gmail, Docs, Maps, etc).
If OpenAI hits jackpot with a "simple" product, it could be easily replicated by a bigger company in the way Meta quickly copied Stories from Snapchat or TikTok to make Reels. It's already happened with Chat; the LLM is hard to compete against but the actual product, a web/app chat interface, was quickly copied by other companies with LLMs.
OpenAI would need to make something very complex and hard to copy to give it a solid head start they could really build a moat around— something like Google Maps, which took Apple years to replicate (and other companies won't even try to) or the iPhone, which was years ahead at launch. I just don't think we've seen OpenAI prove it has the capacity to build a product like that yet.
>If OpenAI hits jackpot with a "simple" product, it could be easily replicated by a bigger company in the way Meta quickly copied Stories from Snapchat or TikTok to make Reels. It's already happened with Chat; the LLM is hard to compete against but the actual product, a web/app chat interface, was quickly copied by other companies with LLMs.
IG reels never became as popular as Tiktok and did basically nothing nothing to peel users away from Tiktok. For a long time, it was a meme that IG reels were just copy pasted tiktok content. Similarly, Meta's LLMs are used so little they honestly don't even register, despite being stuffed into everything they own, apps with billions and billions of users. Gemini is doing well but it's still a very very distant 2nd, despite being automatically downloaded and nudged in android phones, a platform with billions of users. Microsoft is by far the biggest player in consumer laptops, with edge and bing being the default options. So why can't they come even close to chrome and google ?
Time and time again, we've been shown. You can copy all you want, you can even shove it into the faces of your billions of users and find use for it. Doesn't mean you'll beat the market leader. You'll rarely beat market leaders just by copying them.
ChatGPT is the 5th most visited site on the planet. No other Consumer LLM service is remotely close, regardless of how many billions of users the entrenched players are shoving their copies into.
I know plenty of SaaS companies that are paying tens of thousands of dollars every month for LLM optimization & AI visibility. Lots of marketing agencies that have been working hard on delivering paid ads & search engine optimizing are floating in a river of cash now because all these companies are panicking. So, yeah, fully agree that if OpenAI rolls out a halfway decent advertising option, advertisers will throw money at them.