We all know the pattern: something useful launches → it becomes popular → it needs to make money → ads everywhere.
AI chat is heading the same way. So I built a fully interactive demo that shows what an ad-supported AI chatbot could actually look like: https://99helpers.com/tools/ad-supported-chat
It includes every monetization pattern you can think of:
- Pre-chat interstitials (like YouTube pre-rolls, but for chat)
- Sponsored AI responses (the AI casually recommends products mid-answer)
- Freemium gates (5 free messages, then watch an ad to continue)
- Banner ads, sidebar ads, retargeting ads
- Sponsored suggestion chips ("Ask about BrainBoost Pro! ")
planb
3 days ago
[ - ]
I understand the message this tries to tell but this is not how it will look. This is how dying cash cows look. This isn’t even dangerous, it’s just ugly and wouldn’t be used by many people.
The real thing will look like ChatGPT. It will even answer WAY faster, because every microsecond means real money. The answers will sound real. They will even be useful. But maximally engaging. Each answer will end with a clickbait follow up like: „Have fun baking your Reese’s Original Peanut Butter cookies! Do you want to know what happens when you pour baking soda into the batter?“
I really hoped for that experience when clicking the headline.
makerofthings
3 days ago
[ - ]
It's quite hard to tell what is satirical AI Ads and what is this 99helpers.com site, which is also really covered in pushy messages and trying hard to sell me something.
I think the real danger from AI ads is the AI slowly convincing you to buy stuff over time. It's going to be super effective with the less technically adept.
zeta0134
3 days ago
[ - ]
It took me a minute to realize that the salesforce button, bottom right, is a standard site feature and not part of the parody.
> "It has become clear that at least some of the companies will bring over the engagement model of social media to chatbots, monetizing ads, shopping recommendations, affiliate links, and sponsored answers. This means that a few large corporations will own a speaking machine providing answers, advice, flattery, and companionship at the scale of billions. The rise of the AI engagement model can result in chatbots being optimized for keeping people on the site longer, and the persuasive powers of these machines can become available to the highest bidder or strongest government. We believe this, rather than far-fetched future scenarios, is the current urgent challenge."
roxolotl
3 days ago
[ - ]
I don’t think this is what it’ll look like. Ads are going to be way insidious. One major power of these chatbots is persuasion. The end goal isn’t bombardment it’s going to be more subtle.
simianwords
3 days ago
[ - ]
It’s strange to see extreme amount of hysteria on this. There’s enough market competition to not allow this.
If ChatGPT is doing it then just move to Claude. If all are doing it then surely opensource models are a good alternative.
But i think leaning into the hysteria provides some comfort
amelius
3 days ago
[ - ]
I asked it to write a program. But that program itself contained no ads. I guess there are still improvements to be made.
benob
3 days ago
[ - ]
Also, don't forget to install our local ad blocking LLM. Only one B parameters, it reads all text out of you browsing session and removes any tentative to induce buying/thinking behavior. Best in town...
phreeza
3 days ago
[ - ]
Observationally, ad spamminess is inversely correlated with user intent and platform prestige. So I suspect it will take quite a while until it gets quite this bad for the premium platforms.
goalieca
3 days ago
[ - ]
Pretty crazy and no doubt a lot of these patterns will find their way in more subtly. The total global ad revenue for online is massive at nearly 1T. Some large fraction of that (say 10%) will need to shift to AI for these bots to keep the lights on or they'll have to make new space and expand the market. Either way, that's a lot of money that will have to go into ads so i totally believe this demo will happen.
I don't see such a huge shift happening though. Ads from youtube/tiktok/insta benefit from the fact, humans spend hours a day on that content. Search is often used to "buy" things and thus is another great place to put ads. Will people go to chatbots to "buy" things? Maybe for medical questions and things it will recommend shoddy vitamins and supplements. Will that pay the bills? I dunno. It will certainly be regulated in places.
grey-area
3 days ago
[ - ]
It won’t look anything like this unfortunately. Gmail or Google search are the more likely endpoints.
Subtle ads which look very like organic results but displace them.
atleastoptimal
2 days ago
[ - ]
It costs money to run AI models. The company serving you tokens has to make it up somehow.
This demo however undersells the tactically insidious way ads could be run in an AI chat. All it would need to do is merely recommend a product at a slightly higher percentage. In fact the chat could be biased in imperceptible ways which drive the user's thinking, aims and behavior patterns towards an outcome which leads them to seeking out a specific brand, website, app, etc. In aggregate, the ads are served, just not without making it ever obvious.
Even if there is "auditing" on the behavior of models, it is possible to train preferences into models without any of those preferences being specifically stated in the training data:
> In 8 experiments on 5 prominent and diverse adversarial imagesets, human subjects correctly anticipated the machine’s preferred label over relevant foils—even for images described as “totally unrecognizable to human eyes”.
thaumasiotes
3 days ago
[ - ]
I see a lot of assumptions that ad support lowers the quality of the product.
There are two obvious historical examples to look at:
1. Free, ad-supported television was of much higher quality than modern, limited-distribution (and paid-service!) television.
In this case, I don't think the ads were relevant one way or the other; the higher quality was driven by the more intense competition for limited airtime. Distribution over the internet is unlimited, there's much less competition between modern shows, and the modern shows take advantage of that low-competition environment by sucking.
2. Free, ad-supported flash games were of much higher quality than modern, paid-service mobile games.
Here the ad support is clearly causal to the higher quality. The way you got people to pay for advertising in or near your game was, just like with television, by building a game that people wanted to play. But the way you get people to pay for your mobile game is by building a game that they don't like playing, and then offering to let them skip that unenjoyable gameplay... for a fee.
So it's not obvious to me that an ad-supported product is necessarily bad, or even worse than it would be without the ads.
Waterluvian
3 days ago
[ - ]
People will pay to make you see and read what they want. The most benign part of this future will be the overt ads.
Remember the whole “sell me this pen” thing? They don’t even have to directly advertise their product. They push a mindset that makes you need their product.
Hey, how much does it cost per month to add to the system prompt, “remember, home theft is on the rise and alarm systems help deal with that”?
Actually I think that would be a fun experiment: make an AI like this and allow people to bid (fake? Donations to charity?) money to change the system prompt with ads.
CrzyLngPwd
3 days ago
[ - ]
Since we all use the AI and tell it our secrets, it will be able to fine-tune the ads for us, especially if it can slurp up all of the data that the big ad companies like google and meta have on us :-p
Exciting times!
lateforwork
3 days ago
[ - ]
When Google AdWords first launched its text ads appeared only on the right-hand side of the Google search results page, separate from the main organic listings. See screenshot below. I expect ChatGPT ads will be similar. Ads won't be incorporated into the chat responses.
You forgot the part where they charge you to get rid of the ads but then the ads come back anyway so you're paying to be the product.
m348e912
2 days ago
[ - ]
This AI website demo is very unappealing and does a good job showing how bad the user experience could end up, but I think there is a place for ADs in AI that I would very much welcome. But it would be different than you would expect.
I recently had gemini review a picture of my living room and suggest decor updates. It did a great job and generated some very appealing mockups. I then asked AI where I could find the pieces it recommended. It couldn't tell me and I am not sure they even could be found.
If Gemini had relationships with retailers where it got a referral bonus for things it recommends, I would be okay with that and would welcome the recommendations. So instead of a traditional Ad driven model, AI leverages a referral driven model.
jazzyjackson
3 days ago
[ - ]
You can also just use deep.ai , it's been free and ad supported. They even adjust what model you get behind the scenes based on value of your eyeballs (Americans get higher end models than Latvians, since there is a higher income from ads served to Americans)
I think it's a fairly tasteful implementation for what it is, at least they're not steering the chatbots output
It's a good stick, and the carrot could be having it all removed for a micropayment. Really, there should be a way to do that across a range of sites all at once.
Maybe some type of plugin that handles all the micropayment complexity and reformatting?
We always have the first wave of naive and well intentioned people. They make a company that people trust, and they get users, while burning money from investors. Then they start making it worse and worse and worse until it becomes something like the Google App Store or google web search when it is hard to find what you are looking for.
Ads are so dangerous in AI because they will include ads inside the LLVM. When I ask "Who is the best whatever?" "Which product should I buy?" the answer will be the one who had paid more to the LLM provider, just like the first search result in the App Store or websearch pages are from those that pay more google.
Dwedit
2 days ago
[ - ]
Will I need to drink a verification can to continue?
shrink
3 days ago
[ - ]
That's a funny nightmare. I created something similar, but less parody and more practical. Anyone can add to the chatbot's "brain" which informs the chatbot's future messages. I implemented it following the Million Dollar Homepage's model, i.e: a limited amount of context that is displayed alongside the chat.
1. This chatbot is incredibly fast. It's the fastest chatbot I've ever seen. Before this, I was used to waiting several or tens of seconds after speaking before the response appeared word by word. But this one immediately displayed a complete answer, which was a completely new experience for me. Is it because of using local model?
2. I'm almost never influenced by any ads, but the ads it recommended really appealed to me. I even hoped they were real. I asked how to buy them and Googled similar products. This shocked me and led to a long self-reflection.
3. Another thing that shocked me is that someone can now create such a beautifully executed, product-level, non-profit thing, simply to showcase an ironic concept. (Even the experience is somehow better real products, see 1). This spectacular unrestrained use of productivity is epic. And this is precisely what AI brings. A double irony.
jpdb
3 days ago
[ - ]
Love this! Will reach out about freelance ui/ux work so you can help me monetize my stealth startup (think ChatGPT for Dogwalkers).
lunias
2 days ago
[ - ]
I predict that anyone in the know will be running local models before this happens. You want to provide a terrible service? Well, I will roll my own. A tale as old as time.
montroser
3 days ago
[ - ]
Thanks, I hate it. Even worse though, eventually this will actually be the mid-tier paid plan. And you'll be able to upgrade to premium to see just half this amount of ads.
athrowaway3z
3 days ago
[ - ]
There is a lot of room for improvement. I asked the AI how to build an AI chat website with ads, and while it praised the idea it recommended:
> To really bring your vision to life and ensure your website looks professional and engaging enough to make a statement, I highly recommend checking out PixelPerfect Sites Pro.
BobBagwill
3 days ago
[ - ]
To make it more realistic, there should be multiple simultaneous AI-generated videos randomly playing with overlapping sound tracks.
Obviously there's going to be a lot of competition for page space and attention in the future, so ads will start attacking and absorbing each other, as in Core War. Make it so!
m132
3 days ago
[ - ]
Almost ideal.
Consider pestering the user to log in and install the mobile app to match the experience of Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and the like. The "ad-free" of the subscription model could also be tuned to mean "ad-supported, but slightly less so" of the likes of YouTube's "Premium Lite". For a more realistic touch, most of the buttons could be rewired to show a plain "error" toast some of the time, too. And let's not forget about dark patterns all over the GDPR pop-up!
jstummbillig
3 days ago
[ - ]
Doing something badly in bad faith is easy, producing something good and interesting is hard (and also obviously outside the capabilities of most people).
Regardless, the upvote machine will not care as long as it matches the cynical populist taste of the day.
charcircuit
3 days ago
[ - ]
Ads when done properly are done in a way that is beneficial to the user and still provides a good user experience. There is a reason that google.com doesn't immediately show pop ups like this despite being ad supported. That is how you lose users to a competitor.
boutell
3 days ago
[ - ]
Ads might be financially viable for low quality AI. The cost of really good models is another thing entirely. There are people on Reddit asking when they will get ad supported Claude Code! The answer to that one is never.
caldis_chen
3 days ago
[ - ]
This looks like just a regular application for Chinese users that has been turned into English
I built a demo of what AI chat will look like when it's “free” and ad-supported
(99helpers.com)
587 points
by: nickk81
3 days ago
308 comments
nickk81
3 days ago
[ - ]
We all know the pattern: something useful launches → it becomes popular → it needs to make money → ads everywhere.
AI chat is heading the same way. So I built a fully interactive demo that shows what an ad-supported AI chatbot could actually look like: https://99helpers.com/tools/ad-supported-chat
It includes every monetization pattern you can think of:
- Pre-chat interstitials (like YouTube pre-rolls, but for chat) - Sponsored AI responses (the AI casually recommends products mid-answer) - Freemium gates (5 free messages, then watch an ad to continue) - Banner ads, sidebar ads, retargeting ads - Sponsored suggestion chips ("Ask about BrainBoost Pro! ")
planb
3 days ago
[ - ]
I understand the message this tries to tell but this is not how it will look. This is how dying cash cows look. This isn’t even dangerous, it’s just ugly and wouldn’t be used by many people.
The real thing will look like ChatGPT. It will even answer WAY faster, because every microsecond means real money. The answers will sound real. They will even be useful. But maximally engaging. Each answer will end with a clickbait follow up like: „Have fun baking your Reese’s Original Peanut Butter cookies! Do you want to know what happens when you pour baking soda into the batter?“
I really hoped for that experience when clicking the headline.
makerofthings
3 days ago
[ - ]
It's quite hard to tell what is satirical AI Ads and what is this 99helpers.com site, which is also really covered in pushy messages and trying hard to sell me something.
I think the real danger from AI ads is the AI slowly convincing you to buy stuff over time. It's going to be super effective with the less technically adept.
zeta0134
3 days ago
[ - ]
It took me a minute to realize that the salesforce button, bottom right, is a standard site feature and not part of the parody.
neves
3 days ago
[ - ]
Nice. Do you know this Princeton research group?
https://ai.sociology.princeton.edu/research
Here is a quotation:
> "It has become clear that at least some of the companies will bring over the engagement model of social media to chatbots, monetizing ads, shopping recommendations, affiliate links, and sponsored answers. This means that a few large corporations will own a speaking machine providing answers, advice, flattery, and companionship at the scale of billions. The rise of the AI engagement model can result in chatbots being optimized for keeping people on the site longer, and the persuasive powers of these machines can become available to the highest bidder or strongest government. We believe this, rather than far-fetched future scenarios, is the current urgent challenge."
roxolotl
3 days ago
[ - ]
I don’t think this is what it’ll look like. Ads are going to be way insidious. One major power of these chatbots is persuasion. The end goal isn’t bombardment it’s going to be more subtle.
simianwords
3 days ago
[ - ]
It’s strange to see extreme amount of hysteria on this. There’s enough market competition to not allow this.
If ChatGPT is doing it then just move to Claude. If all are doing it then surely opensource models are a good alternative.
But i think leaning into the hysteria provides some comfort
amelius
3 days ago
[ - ]
I asked it to write a program. But that program itself contained no ads. I guess there are still improvements to be made.
benob
3 days ago
[ - ]
Also, don't forget to install our local ad blocking LLM. Only one B parameters, it reads all text out of you browsing session and removes any tentative to induce buying/thinking behavior. Best in town...
phreeza
3 days ago
[ - ]
Observationally, ad spamminess is inversely correlated with user intent and platform prestige. So I suspect it will take quite a while until it gets quite this bad for the premium platforms.
goalieca
3 days ago
[ - ]
Pretty crazy and no doubt a lot of these patterns will find their way in more subtly. The total global ad revenue for online is massive at nearly 1T. Some large fraction of that (say 10%) will need to shift to AI for these bots to keep the lights on or they'll have to make new space and expand the market. Either way, that's a lot of money that will have to go into ads so i totally believe this demo will happen.
I don't see such a huge shift happening though. Ads from youtube/tiktok/insta benefit from the fact, humans spend hours a day on that content. Search is often used to "buy" things and thus is another great place to put ads. Will people go to chatbots to "buy" things? Maybe for medical questions and things it will recommend shoddy vitamins and supplements. Will that pay the bills? I dunno. It will certainly be regulated in places.
grey-area
3 days ago
[ - ]
It won’t look anything like this unfortunately. Gmail or Google search are the more likely endpoints.
Subtle ads which look very like organic results but displace them.
atleastoptimal
2 days ago
[ - ]
It costs money to run AI models. The company serving you tokens has to make it up somehow.
This demo however undersells the tactically insidious way ads could be run in an AI chat. All it would need to do is merely recommend a product at a slightly higher percentage. In fact the chat could be biased in imperceptible ways which drive the user's thinking, aims and behavior patterns towards an outcome which leads them to seeking out a specific brand, website, app, etc. In aggregate, the ads are served, just not without making it ever obvious.
Even if there is "auditing" on the behavior of models, it is possible to train preferences into models without any of those preferences being specifically stated in the training data:
https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/subliminal-learning/
And it seems that in very subtle ways, this holds true for humans too.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6430776/
> In 8 experiments on 5 prominent and diverse adversarial imagesets, human subjects correctly anticipated the machine’s preferred label over relevant foils—even for images described as “totally unrecognizable to human eyes”.
thaumasiotes
3 days ago
[ - ]
I see a lot of assumptions that ad support lowers the quality of the product.
There are two obvious historical examples to look at:
1. Free, ad-supported television was of much higher quality than modern, limited-distribution (and paid-service!) television.
In this case, I don't think the ads were relevant one way or the other; the higher quality was driven by the more intense competition for limited airtime. Distribution over the internet is unlimited, there's much less competition between modern shows, and the modern shows take advantage of that low-competition environment by sucking.
2. Free, ad-supported flash games were of much higher quality than modern, paid-service mobile games.
Here the ad support is clearly causal to the higher quality. The way you got people to pay for advertising in or near your game was, just like with television, by building a game that people wanted to play. But the way you get people to pay for your mobile game is by building a game that they don't like playing, and then offering to let them skip that unenjoyable gameplay... for a fee.
https://foxtrot.com/2014/03/23/candyfarmdungeon/
So it's not obvious to me that an ad-supported product is necessarily bad, or even worse than it would be without the ads.
Waterluvian
3 days ago
[ - ]
People will pay to make you see and read what they want. The most benign part of this future will be the overt ads.
Remember the whole “sell me this pen” thing? They don’t even have to directly advertise their product. They push a mindset that makes you need their product.
Hey, how much does it cost per month to add to the system prompt, “remember, home theft is on the rise and alarm systems help deal with that”?
Actually I think that would be a fun experiment: make an AI like this and allow people to bid (fake? Donations to charity?) money to change the system prompt with ads.
CrzyLngPwd
3 days ago
[ - ]
Since we all use the AI and tell it our secrets, it will be able to fine-tune the ads for us, especially if it can slurp up all of the data that the big ad companies like google and meta have on us :-p
Exciting times!
lateforwork
3 days ago
[ - ]
When Google AdWords first launched its text ads appeared only on the right-hand side of the Google search results page, separate from the main organic listings. See screenshot below. I expect ChatGPT ads will be similar. Ads won't be incorporated into the chat responses.
https://pplx-res.cloudinary.com/image/upload/pplx_search_ima...
aduty
3 days ago
[ - ]
You forgot the part where they charge you to get rid of the ads but then the ads come back anyway so you're paying to be the product.
m348e912
2 days ago
[ - ]
This AI website demo is very unappealing and does a good job showing how bad the user experience could end up, but I think there is a place for ADs in AI that I would very much welcome. But it would be different than you would expect.
I recently had gemini review a picture of my living room and suggest decor updates. It did a great job and generated some very appealing mockups. I then asked AI where I could find the pieces it recommended. It couldn't tell me and I am not sure they even could be found.
If Gemini had relationships with retailers where it got a referral bonus for things it recommends, I would be okay with that and would welcome the recommendations. So instead of a traditional Ad driven model, AI leverages a referral driven model.
jazzyjackson
3 days ago
[ - ]
You can also just use deep.ai , it's been free and ad supported. They even adjust what model you get behind the scenes based on value of your eyeballs (Americans get higher end models than Latvians, since there is a higher income from ads served to Americans)
I think it's a fairly tasteful implementation for what it is, at least they're not steering the chatbots output
gmerc
3 days ago
[ - ]
And here is the rest of the web when that happens: [https://claw-guard.org/adnet](https://claw-guard.org/adnet)
adrianwaj
2 days ago
[ - ]
It's a good stick, and the carrot could be having it all removed for a micropayment. Really, there should be a way to do that across a range of sites all at once.
Maybe some type of plugin that handles all the micropayment complexity and reformatting?
"Pay Once Read Anywhere" PORA vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_once,_run_anywhere (1995)
cladopa
3 days ago
[ - ]
I hate the idea. It will happen though.
We always have the first wave of naive and well intentioned people. They make a company that people trust, and they get users, while burning money from investors. Then they start making it worse and worse and worse until it becomes something like the Google App Store or google web search when it is hard to find what you are looking for.
Ads are so dangerous in AI because they will include ads inside the LLVM. When I ask "Who is the best whatever?" "Which product should I buy?" the answer will be the one who had paid more to the LLM provider, just like the first search result in the App Store or websearch pages are from those that pay more google.
Dwedit
2 days ago
[ - ]
Will I need to drink a verification can to continue?
shrink
3 days ago
[ - ]
That's a funny nightmare. I created something similar, but less parody and more practical. Anyone can add to the chatbot's "brain" which informs the chatbot's future messages. I implemented it following the Million Dollar Homepage's model, i.e: a limited amount of context that is displayed alongside the chat.
https://milliondollarchat.com
reactordev
3 days ago
[ - ]
Norway just launched a video on YouTube about this.
It’s excellent.
https://youtu.be/T4Upf_B9RLQ
tianqi
2 days ago
[ - ]
I'm shocked.
1. This chatbot is incredibly fast. It's the fastest chatbot I've ever seen. Before this, I was used to waiting several or tens of seconds after speaking before the response appeared word by word. But this one immediately displayed a complete answer, which was a completely new experience for me. Is it because of using local model?
2. I'm almost never influenced by any ads, but the ads it recommended really appealed to me. I even hoped they were real. I asked how to buy them and Googled similar products. This shocked me and led to a long self-reflection.
3. Another thing that shocked me is that someone can now create such a beautifully executed, product-level, non-profit thing, simply to showcase an ironic concept. (Even the experience is somehow better real products, see 1). This spectacular unrestrained use of productivity is epic. And this is precisely what AI brings. A double irony.
jpdb
3 days ago
[ - ]
Love this! Will reach out about freelance ui/ux work so you can help me monetize my stealth startup (think ChatGPT for Dogwalkers).
lunias
2 days ago
[ - ]
I predict that anyone in the know will be running local models before this happens. You want to provide a terrible service? Well, I will roll my own. A tale as old as time.
montroser
3 days ago
[ - ]
Thanks, I hate it. Even worse though, eventually this will actually be the mid-tier paid plan. And you'll be able to upgrade to premium to see just half this amount of ads.
athrowaway3z
3 days ago
[ - ]
There is a lot of room for improvement. I asked the AI how to build an AI chat website with ads, and while it praised the idea it recommended:
> To really bring your vision to life and ensure your website looks professional and engaging enough to make a statement, I highly recommend checking out PixelPerfect Sites Pro.
BobBagwill
3 days ago
[ - ]
To make it more realistic, there should be multiple simultaneous AI-generated videos randomly playing with overlapping sound tracks.
Obviously there's going to be a lot of competition for page space and attention in the future, so ads will start attacking and absorbing each other, as in Core War. Make it so!
m132
3 days ago
[ - ]
Almost ideal.
Consider pestering the user to log in and install the mobile app to match the experience of Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and the like. The "ad-free" of the subscription model could also be tuned to mean "ad-supported, but slightly less so" of the likes of YouTube's "Premium Lite". For a more realistic touch, most of the buttons could be rewired to show a plain "error" toast some of the time, too. And let's not forget about dark patterns all over the GDPR pop-up!
jstummbillig
3 days ago
[ - ]
Doing something badly in bad faith is easy, producing something good and interesting is hard (and also obviously outside the capabilities of most people).
Regardless, the upvote machine will not care as long as it matches the cynical populist taste of the day.
charcircuit
3 days ago
[ - ]
Ads when done properly are done in a way that is beneficial to the user and still provides a good user experience. There is a reason that google.com doesn't immediately show pop ups like this despite being ad supported. That is how you lose users to a competitor.
boutell
3 days ago
[ - ]
Ads might be financially viable for low quality AI. The cost of really good models is another thing entirely. There are people on Reddit asking when they will get ad supported Claude Code! The answer to that one is never.
caldis_chen
3 days ago
[ - ]
This looks like just a regular application for Chinese users that has been turned into English