Comment by bbor
10 hours ago
I don't think it's related to AI, at least not originally. To me this is about the slow death of display advertising. The arms race of ad blockers and ad blocker blockers and such has created a world where people hate display ads, especially because they require so much creepy data to even work in the first place.
AI probably would help their display ad business overall -- they finally just launched a "have Gemini create your ad!" feature, and I imagine having to hire a designer was a common blocker for SMBs.
My understanding was that the Ad business was starting to suffer because of how much bot activity there's been both in social media and indexed search (Google).
But I wouldn't write off ads yet. It seems plausible to me that LLMs will be able to slightly alter their output to casually mention paying brands and to profile users better than we could before.
> To me this is about the slow death of display advertising.
That's good. I hate ads. I will fight them down until they are gone.
But I don't think this is the case here. Ads are still pushed down onto the people willy-nilly style.