Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedJohn Collison: belief
12 Feb 2026 Cheeky Pint Ben Thompson from Stratechery on AI ads, the end of SaaS, and the future of media
“I agree there’s kind of a knee-jerk skepticism of ads. Look, I'm a YouTube Premium subscriber.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- John Collison
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 12 Feb 2026
- Publisher
- Cheeky Pint
Transcript context
…TBD, to a certain extent. I mean, this is part of the huge, probably one of the most angsty debates that I have internally generally, which is OpenAI's sort of welfare going forward. I put forward a few years ago that actually OpenAI could stop making models and be one of the most valuable companies in the world just because of ChatGPT. That's their most valuable asset. And part of the problem that they have is that was definitely the case in 2023 and 2024, but they never… You have to actually build the business model around that. And I've, I think fairly famously, at least based on all the tweets that I got when they announced that they were going to launch ads, I've been losing my mind about this fact for a long time. And I think this is interesting. I'd actually be curious to hear your view of this, which is, there's this mindset in the Valley of this skepticism of advertising and people have sort of internalized that it's bad and evil. Do you sense that? Do you feel that? I agree there’s kind of a knee-jerk skepticism of ads. Look, I'm a YouTube Premium subscriber. When I see someone watch a video without Premium— It’s horrifying.…
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