← Back to context

Comment by MontyCarloHall

15 hours ago

Kagi is a niche product at best, with revenue literally orders of magnitude lower than Google's.

At one time Google was a niche website, literally orders of magnitude lower than Alta Vista.

  • With that logic, are you also going to expect Kagi to generate minimum $10B to $35B in revenue a quarter over the next 27 years then, the lifetime of Google's existence?

    Do you see how such a comparison doesn't work?

    • No, I don't expect it to be the next Google, nor did my statement imply that. The point was that just because something is small doesn't mean it has to remain small. That is true whether or not Kagi never becomes the biggest.

      > Do you see how such a comparison doesn't work?

      No, I don't.

      1 reply →

Yes, but it is still a valid counterexample to:

> I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers

  • Kagi is too small and niche to have a proprietary dataset across its users large enough to make targeted advertising generate more revenue than subscriptions.

    OpenAI/Google/etc. operate at a much larger scale, large enough for those proprietary user datasets to be worth far more in ad revenue than any reasonable subscription fee could net.

    • > Kagi is too small and niche to have a proprietary dataset across its users large enough to make targeted advertising generate more revenue than subscriptions.

      All of this is true. But I don't understand why you are contesting @dsr_'s comment that Kagi is a counterexample. Both are true. Kagi is too small. Yes. And Kagi is a counterexample to your original "I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers" claim. You said nothing about being too big or too small in that claim. So @dsr_'s comment that Kagi is a counterexample is very much on point.

  • I think they're saying it's inevitable for billion dollar capitalist companies. /not-s

    And anyway, companies that just want to make a really good living doing what they love are lame. /s

  • It's really not, though. If a "valid counterexample" can be something with, say, one user, then I can make a "valid counterexample" to literally anything you choose, but that's meaningless.

    • Someone is showing that they can deliver similar products or services without ads. It’s comparable.

      Not every corporate entity needs to become a behemoth to be successful.