How many of these users will be able to be monitized is an unanswered question as of yet however.
API usage on the other hand has a clear path to monetization and as of right now Anthropic is looking a lot better than OpenAI there.
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Everyone. People are becoming dependent on chatgpt. They literally cannot function professionally or even socially without it. They will pay their last 20-30 dollars if needed. It's literally like a drug especially when it's asking you if you want to followup/continue.
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.
How do you explain that not even 5% of users are on paid subscriptions?
This has nothing to do with what i said. I said they are addicted. The free limits are designed this way. If openai suddenly removed the free plan, i guarantee you a lot of people would buy. They dont have an alternative they cannot think independently anymore
At least one of us is inside a bubble. Nobody I interact with regularly uses chatgpt for anything more than novelty. Even people who used it as glorified google for looking up things reduced their use.
There are definitely big?bubbles where everyone has outsourced their thinking to AI. I’d like to think it’s mostly at the lower end of “knowledge work” - think Deloitte, but it seems that even people / orgs that you would expect more critical thinking of are using it uncritically.
Of course this all occurs in a very small segment of society, I think the majority of people don’t really use it, and certainly haven’t moved any of their day-to-day thinking over to it.
monetization is straightforward - the only question is who gets the money and which business models succeed.