Comment by parliament32
3 days ago
"Near billion users", yet less than 5% pay them a single penny[1]. Like you said, the vast majority of these will never pay anything, but I'd argue the majority will migrate to the "next" free provider as soon as OpenAI starts inserting too many ads into the product.
I watched my partner switch from OAI to DeepSeek during the last outage and she hasn't been back to OAI since. I am skeptical there is any actual stickyness when basically all of the chatbots do the same thing for the casual user.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/15/openais_chatgpt_popul...
Google Search has no stickiness and they managed to build a behemoth.
ChatGPT is a great product, but the lack of stickiness comes into play because there are many viable alternatives.
They’re all going to have to monetise the consumer segment at some stage, and I think that’s likely to be via ads on a freemium tier in most instances.
Google Search used to be awesome, heads, shoulders, belt buckle and knees above everyone else.
Seriously, I still remember the moment I first used Google. I was using Altavista / OpenText and Yahoo now and then. I thought Altavista was the best and OpenText was for geeking out. Once I tried Google I never looked back for decades. Their tech was their moat.
Google Search was head & shoulders better than the alternatives back when Google was developing into the behemoth it is today.
Google search still has a ton of stickiness for the casual user.
You say 5% of users pay like it’s a shockingly bad number, but that’s almost exactly the same as YouTube’s paid subscribers (125m) vs MAUs (2.5b).
Like it or not, OpenAI is building a real business. It’s obviously capital intensive, but we will see how it goes.
And no, the vast majority will not migrate. Just like the vast majority didn’t migrate away from Google after they launched ads.
I don’t get the HN urge to be the contrarian saying “that’ll never work.”
OpenAI is sitting on top of a $100+ billion ad revenue business just waiting to happen. Those 95% of users not paying anything are about to start paying something.
They can't afford to wait.
OpenAI every day is closer and closer to collapse, they urgently need an IPO to pass the hot potato to someone else.
They have 35B USD in the bank.
They did 13B USD in revenue in 2025, and in 2026 they plan to spend 55B USD.
They are already dead if they don't find new people to lend them money.
One of the solution is to sell the company to fools (the general public / IPO), so founders and investors can get away with it and, buy a bit of runway for the company.