Big surprise. It’s almost as if internet 1.0 shook out the way it did for a reason, and for all the complaining about ads, fast forward 25 years and consumers still fundamentally refuse to pay for search.<p>It’s the same reason the phone book was also free and ad supported pre-internet.<p>I don’t know why we can’t accept this reality and why we need to masochistically flog ourselves every time this is proven true over and over again.
Interesting that the ad is for TurboTax of all things.<p>As a non-user, would Perplexity attempt to answer the question of "Why is TurboTax the best tax filing software?" with a response that cites the many efforts TurboTax has made to block a free public alternative?<p>TurboTax’s fight against free tax filing - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31072202">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31072202</a>
What are the advantages of Perplexity over, say, ChatGPT?<p>I use three LLMs atm (ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok), and have a decent sense for which is better at different tasks. For example, when asked about questionable web scraping ChatGPT and Claude give answers regarding ethics, whereas Grok gives more direct, technical response.<p>What is Perplexity better than other LLMs at?
No surprise here, but what a bummer that this is "The Way™"<p>Just let me pay you $3-5/ month to never see an ad again. It's worth it to me since the service is actually decent.
I like how AI generated ads tacitly confirm that advertisement was never about exposure and introducing people to new things. No, it's about automating deception on a grand scale and awarding the people that can most effectively control an audience.<p>Why <i>is</i> TurboTax the best way to file my taxes, anyways?
This seems like a very dangerous play.<p>The selling point of these AIs is that they can give you accurate answers. Mixing up answers and ads like this seems like a recipe for loss of trust.<p>I know it’s the same thing that Google did with search results, but this seems different to me.<p>That question is obviously correctly answered by “It’s not. Here are several alternatives that are just as good and better and cheaper or even free, etc.” But we know that won’t be the answer.<p>So what is the result of typing that question directly? Is it different from the result of clicking the question as an ad? Can I get the right answer anymore? Will the interface show that the answer itself is an ad? Can I switch back to an un-“bribed to give me the wrong answer” interface?
Makes me wonder if the lowering of prices in this industry is temporary. Currently, the API costs are at an all-time low, but how much of it is subsidized by investor money? Are we going to see increasing prices as the hype goes away and post-nut clarity kicks in the industry?
This was announced in November: <a href="https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/why-we-re-experimenting-with-advertising" rel="nofollow">https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/why-we-re-experimenting-w...</a>
My wife and I both pay for Kagi Ultimate, which they've quietly developed as a Perplexity killer. Aggregates all the major LLMs and couples them with Kagi's clean search results with citations. All with no ads, no bullshit. It's the whole corporate mission. It's awesome. I hope enough people are willing to pay to make Kagi successful.
The thing about SEO for LLMs is that placing your business in an LLM organically is probably indistinguishable from actually being a good business and being recommended by people (or indistinguishable from faking reviews on google maps or yelp.)
AI products will be speed running the last few decades of tech - make a compelling product, then add ads based on the prompt, then store prompts from each user and build psychological profiles, and finally manipulate AI output to maximize user susceptibility to part with their hard earned money. Bonus points if they can get the user addicted to their product.
I am the founder of <a href="https://hika.fyi/" rel="nofollow">https://hika.fyi/</a>. In my view, Perplexity doesn't truly grasp users' needs and appears to be in a rush to monetize from them.
Setting aside the general question of Perplexity being an ad-supported service, I don't like that it's unclear exactly what the advertiser is sponsoring. Are they just paying for the suggested query to appear? Or do they also get a say in which sources the model uses to craft it's answer? Or even get to preview and approve the model's response?
I pay for Perplexity (and for Anthropic and for OpenAI and lots of other services) just so I don’t see ads. I absolutely detest ads. That’s why I hardly use Google anymore because its results are polluted, both search results and images. The results are not authentic (anymore). So this is a very bad move by Perplexity.
Genuine question, more for soloentrepreneurs, but what if instead of adding ads from other companies, the perplexity company did other paid products?<p>Then they could put a few non disruptive ads for those into their main free product, and they would make much more sense.<p>I want to apply this strategy into my (yet non existent) future products.
It's a tough game for Perplexity as long as they use Google's search, and with Google now providing "AI Summaries," and with the whole ad ecosystem (invented by Google) designed to turn us into predictable consuming robots, what's a pre-IPO company
going to do? Fight the good fight and stick with a subscription model, or knuckle under and start sending us Google ads?<p>Sucks. I will say this though: as soon as I see ads in my Perplexity search results, I'm cancelling my paid subscription and simply going back to Google. Without any other differentiating feature set, why would I pay Perplexity?<p>RIP, Perplexity; it was good while it lasted.
I'm conflicted on this. I use perplexity at the moment because they gave out a year of pro subscriptions, and it's geuninely pretty useful since it is so heavily based on web results. The one gpt wrapper product that I've liked so far.<p>With the actual model producers now also adding web search, the question is how long they will survive and how much value they can realistically add. The third-party models are also nerfed with less context length, and also seem less capable overall when comparing sonnet on perplexity to sonnet in the claude interface.<p>It makes sense that when the massive funding runs out these companies won't be able to offer free plans without ads or anything, still sucks.
I accidentally (another story) bought Revolut Metal (yes, the international micropayment/credit card provider) and besides other apps, I got a Perplexity pro subscription.<p>It works great, TBH, especially now that is "free" for me. I hope it won't start including sponsored links.<p>(Another tool I use daily and came with this subscription, is NordVPN. So at the end I don't mind that I accidentally clicked on the buy button)
It’s ironic that most people have jobs in the first place thanks to ads but hate on ads every day.<p>Without ads the world would basically stop, they drive the businesses, each and every one.<p>It’s a necessary evil that will always be in most popular products, especially considering most people want to get all value for free.
well it's a company and no one is forced to use their product if they don't like their business model.<p>Everyone knew they couldn't keep being free for ever, and i believe it's only a beginning. one sponsored result per prompt ain't going to balance the expense.
I noticed this when I was served an ad for the newish Venom movie. Add in TurboTax, and it seems like they really have no discretion about who they are willing to advertise for. That is worrisome.
perplexity is a great product, but it's a feature, not the app.<p>they are in the middle — not really a lab, not really a consumer product.<p>i expect them to get acquired in the next year or so.
A large reason LLMs are useful for search and answering questions is because they omit the ads and (LLM-generated!) garbage listicles to give the searcher a straight answer. Ads are, by definition, worse for the searcher. If they were quality and strongly related to the query they would be organic results.<p>IMO it was always inevitable that companies will put the ads back in, removing this benefit. Perhaps the paid AI offerings will be able to continue focusing on quality results for the searchers.