This is the twelfth year for which I have published year-ahead predictions related to the mobile marketing and mobile gaming […]
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greg.speicher@gmail.comJan 5, 2026 5:32 pm
Regarding OpenAI and advertising, I think a case can be made that—counterintuitively—Google is counter-positioned against OpenAI’s ad initiative. That may help explain why Altman has been slow to pull the trigger, even in the face of rising competition.
ChatGPT’s PMF rests on being a clean, decisive, high-trust answer engine. That posture is superb for facts—but structurally misfit for commerce, where there is no “right” answer, only preference-laden tradeoffs. Once a system renders the answer, the decision space is collapsed. Ads introduced afterward feel incoherent because judgment has already been passed.
Google, by contrast, spent decades conditioning users to treat its surface as a marketplace. That legacy is now an advantage: Google can deploy clean AI answers where monetization is weak, while preserving option-based, ad-dense interfaces exactly where revenue concentrates. OpenAI cannot mirror this selectively without potentially violating the uniform purity that powered its adoption.
Comments:
Regarding OpenAI and advertising, I think a case can be made that—counterintuitively—Google is counter-positioned against OpenAI’s ad initiative. That may help explain why Altman has been slow to pull the trigger, even in the face of rising competition.
ChatGPT’s PMF rests on being a clean, decisive, high-trust answer engine. That posture is superb for facts—but structurally misfit for commerce, where there is no “right” answer, only preference-laden tradeoffs. Once a system renders the answer, the decision space is collapsed. Ads introduced afterward feel incoherent because judgment has already been passed.
Google, by contrast, spent decades conditioning users to treat its surface as a marketplace. That legacy is now an advantage: Google can deploy clean AI answers where monetization is weak, while preserving option-based, ad-dense interfaces exactly where revenue concentrates. OpenAI cannot mirror this selectively without potentially violating the uniform purity that powered its adoption.