A big story that most people are missing in the AI race for the consumer (ChatGPT vs Claude) is ads. Right now, most consumer AI revenue is coming from power users who are willing to pay high cost subscriptions. This currently skews positive for products like Claude - but this will not be the end state. Google makes ~$460/ user/year in the U.S., mostly on ads. Meta makes around ~$250. I would argue ChatGPT’s ad-based ARPUs will be even higher as they will ultimately have deeper / more frequent user engagement. Even at the $460 level - monetizing everyone in the U.S. via ads is $152 billion in annual revenue. By contrast, if you’re able to monetize even 5% of the population on a $200/month subscription (which is a stretch!), that’s only $40 billion 🤔 I suspect this will be even more drastic outside the U.S. where users are even less willing or able to pay directly for subscriptions. And, the earliest data from a very small rollout shows ChatGPT ads are already outperforming Meta in effectiveness - this just gets better over time. TL;DR - I would not count ChatGPT out on consumer AI revenue. Once ads start working, that can quickly become a massive machine.

h/t @illscience for thinking through this with me 😊