With that logic, are you also going to expect Kagi to generate minimum $10B to $35B in revenue a quarter over the next 27 years then, the lifetime of Google's existence?
No, I don't expect it to be the next Google, nor did my statement imply that. The point was that just because something is small doesn't mean it has to remain small. That is true whether or not Kagi never becomes the biggest.
Kagi is too small and niche to have a proprietary dataset across its users large enough to make targeted advertising generate more revenue than subscriptions.
OpenAI/Google/etc. operate at a much larger scale, large enough for those proprietary user datasets to be worth far more in ad revenue than any reasonable subscription fee could net.
> Kagi is too small and niche to have a proprietary dataset across its users large enough to make targeted advertising generate more revenue than subscriptions.
All of this is true. But I don't understand why you are contesting @dsr_'s comment that Kagi is a counterexample. Both are true. Kagi is too small. Yes. And Kagi is a counterexample to your original "I think ads will inevitably roll out across all tiers" claim. You said nothing about being too big or too small in that claim. So @dsr_'s comment that Kagi is a counterexample is very much on point.
It's really not, though. If a "valid counterexample" can be something with, say, one user, then I can make a "valid counterexample" to literally anything you choose, but that's meaningless.
