Writing
Advertising, inference economics, and the interfaces that replace the page.
AdCP standardizes how AI agents discover, negotiate, and buy media. It's overdue and good for the category — but it stops short of deciding how an ad renders inside a chat answer.
A plain-English reference to the ad-tech, pricing, privacy, and AI-native vocabulary behind monetizing AI chat — from RTB and CPM to intent signals and inference-time bidding.
Inference costs are real and free tiers don't pay for themselves. Here's the honest menu of ways to monetize an AI chat app — and how to add ads without ruining the thing people came for.
Why the next generation of advertising will be native to AI-generated conversations, not bolted onto them.
Real-time bidding was built for page loads. Conversations load one token at a time. Here's what has to change — and what surprisingly doesn't.
Privacy on the open web leaked because the surface leaked. AI products aren't the same surface — and the privacy posture shouldn't be either.
OpenAI started testing ads in ChatGPT on February 9. A labeled sponsored card below the answer, ad-free paid tiers, CPM pricing. The restraint is the story.
The ad industry spent a decade getting worse at contextual. It's about to get a lot better, for a reason nobody in ad tech predicted.
The Simo hire, the Head-of-Ads search, leaked Android strings, and a reported plan. ChatGPT ads are now a question of how, not if — and the format will decide everything.
Media buying is heading toward agents transacting with agents. We have seen the shape of this before, and here is what is genuinely different this time.
Perplexity just started running ads inside AI-generated answers. It validates an entire category — and sets an early bar for what good ads in answers should look like.
A working definition of native advertising, where it came from, why it beats interruptive formats, and the disclosure duty that keeps it honest.
RTB turns every ad impression into a sealed-bid auction that clears in about a tenth of a second. Here is how that auction actually works, and why it replaced the old way of selling ads.