Getting users into your product is under fire because of AI monetizing it away.

And Google's main source of income... Ad's is responsible for it.

Paid acquisition is one of the easiest (not necessarily cheapest) ways to bring users into your product. And it's under fire like never before because of how Google's 280 billion USD revenue is structured.

What if people stop looking at your fancy billboards?

AI still has to prove (but it's likely) that it can turn a significant market share they attack into $ themselves, for instance by turning their users into monthly recurring users shifting some of Google's ad revenue to them.

This sentence means much more than people realize. Google's revenue is pretty much synonymous with connecting people through ads to companies.

That's what advertising is. It connects users to products. If language models like ChatGPT are shifting that revenue to their side into paying subscribers they are not available anymore to be acquired through paid advertising.

You cannot click on ads that you don't see. And if chat GPT and other generative AI's do not monetize with ads then that revenue just went poof.

From a use case perspective, if you get your answer through a product outside of Google search or visiting a partner site that delivers Google ads then you are unacquirable by these ads.

And what if this starts to happen on a broad basis, then classical sales-led companies or any business model that relies on classical SEO or paid Advertising will have a harder time connecting their revenue with paid traffic.

You better are ready to be product-led. Either through growth or sales but if you don't start to think NOW how Word of Mouth can drive acquisition for you in the future then it might be too late when the above happens.

It’s crazy because Google is SO big when it comes to advertising that this is not just about shifting market shares. It’s about how we buy products fundamentally. Newspapers with their 10 ads per sentence are already on life support, what’s next? The Golden Age of paid advertising?

The need will always be there but it might just become much more expensive and in some cases actually impossible to access people.

This is what we are talking about when we say that the age of (digital) acquisition is "dead".

• Differentiation will become more difficult.

• There is less traffic to go around in general.

• Other paid channels than digital may become more important again.

Or well, your product just can't suck anymore for acquiring users