Everyone also uses Google, YouTube or Instagram. No one would ever pay for any of it though and it is financed through ads. So far it is unclear, if this is also a viable option for chatgpt.
Everyone also uses Google, YouTube or Instagram. No one would ever pay for any of it though and it is financed through ads. So far it is unclear, if this is also a viable option for chatgpt.
YouTube Premium has over 125 million subscribers.
Out of about 2.7 billion users. So about 5% of all users are subscribed to YouTube.
If the same were true then Open AI at 1 billion weekly users they should have about 50 million subscribers. Right now that numbers sits at 20 million though and growth is slowing down. [1]
So people are more willing to pay for YouTube than ChatGPT and that is ignoring that YouTube is still largely relying on ad revenue and can only allow itself to have more and more ads as there are no alternatives. Open AI has plenty of competitors that would love to offer users free access if ChatGPT were to start showing you ads.
[1] https://fortune.com/2025/10/14/openai-subscriptions-flatline...
> Everyone also uses Google, YouTube or Instagram. No one would ever pay for any of it though and it is financed through ads.
A lot of people already pay for YouTube since the introduction of Premium. Google/Facebook don't push for paid versions of these products because the data from billions of "free" users is more valuable to them than payments from millions of paid users.
If Google search were paywalled (pre-AI) the most likely outcome would be a separation of consumers into "premium" customers paying for Google, some people paying for cheaper but not quite as good alternatives, and everyone else getting by with the free alternatives. There would also likely be some kind of enterprise tier for indexing your corporate resources or some such.
There's a reason Adobe is still extracting billions from its ~~victims~~ users despite many great free (or reasonably priced) alternatives existing.