Anthropic is airing a pair of TV commercials during Sunday's game that ridicule OpenAI for the digital advertising it's beginning to place on free and cheaper versions of ChatGPT. While Anthropic has centered its revenue model on selling Claude to other businesses, OpenAI has opened the doors to ads as a way of making money from the hundreds of millions of consumers who get ChatGPT for free.
Snap SNAP reported fourth-quarter revenue of $1.72 billion, up 10% year over year, largely due to strength in average revenue per user. Adjusted EBITDA margin came in at 21%, up 300 basis points from the prior year, owing to growing operating leverage and a favorable sales mix. Why it matters: Despite a 5% year-over-year decline in global daily active users, or DAUs, traction in high-margin offerings such as Snapchat+, Sponsored Snaps, and Memories Storage Plans improved core platform monetization, supporting both top-line and profitability expansion.
Though Tattle TV - a UK-based streaming platform created by filmmakers Philip McGoldrick and Marina Elderton - features a reality dating series about dog-owners and a modern drama about a female MMA fighter, the company's latest debut is a vertically-oriented edit of Alfred Hitchcock's silent film The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. Similar to other microdrama apps, Tattle TV splits all of its content into short segments that can be purchased individually using an in-app currency (Tattle Coins).
Over the past year, Meta Platforms ( META) has significantly underperformed most of its Magnificent Seven counterparts, posting a meager 5% return while Alphabet ( GOOG, GOOGL) surged 66% and even Apple ( AAPL) managed a 12% gain. Investor skepticism has largely stemmed from Meta's aggressive shift toward artificial intelligence, which has necessitated hefty capital outlays and - for the first time in years - taking on substantial debt to fund expansive data centers and AI infrastructure.
The app I'm talking about is Threads, which is rolling out ads to all Threads users globally starting next week. The platform, which is somewhat of a safe haven for advertisers, at least when compared to X, will leverage its 400 million+ monthly active users to rake in cold, hard cash. The development follows the initial rollout of ads on Threads to advertisers last spring.
OpenAI is putting ads into ChatGPT in "the coming weeks," as well as bringing its ChatGPT Go subscription tier to the US starting today. The free ChatGPT and ChatGPT Go plans will have advertisements, which is the biggest news, given ChatGPT Go has already launched in 171 countries since August. For $8 per month, it offers more access to messaging, image creation, file uploads, and memory.