• Dave@lemmy.nz
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    13時間前

    What’s a normal amount? What proportion of people with Dropbox or Google Docs or Hotmail are paying customers?

    Having a little over 1% doesn’t seem that bad, I am faar more surprised that over 1% of users pay for ChatGPT (if your numbers are accurate).

    • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
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      13時間前

      What proportion of people with Dropbox or Google Docs or Hotmail are paying customers?

      Dropbox is nice enough to list it.

      They have 700m users, and 18m of them pay for the service, so about double of OpenAI. Completely unlike OpenAI, however, they make quite a bit of profit, having a revenue of 2.55b and 1.63b in operating costs. OpenAI subscribers can’t even cover their own cost of inference.

      • Dave@lemmy.nz
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        13時間前

        Thanks for the numbers, you were saying the subscriber percentage was embarrassing so I was curious about that rather than their fairly infamous losses.

        You’ve said OpenAI have about half the subscriber percentage of Dropbox, but if Dropbox is that profitable then that seems like they are doing particularly well and perhaps that subscriber percent is above average?

        • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
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          12時間前

          Peope don’t usually compare OpenAI with Dropbox, but Dropbox isn’t particularly great with the free-to-paid converion rating. 2.6% is pretty bad, but they STILL manage to make money because what they do is pretty cheap on a per-user basis. They just host data, and most of that data isn’t really used much. Also, I don’t know if Dropbox is “that” profitable. All I could find is that their revenue exceeds their operating costs, but I don’t know if that covers R&D or marketting, which they probably spend a LOT of money on.

          Comparisons with YouTube and Spotify get thrown around a lot more, which convert around 5% and a whoppingly insane 36%, compared to OpenAI’s measly 1%. And both YouTube and Spotify actually make a LOT of money on their “free” users, via ads. OpenAI has no monetisation beyond subscribers, and they’re very bad at getting people to pay for their stuff.

          • Dave@lemmy.nz
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            12時間前

            Yeah that’s a fair point. I don’t think Dropbox does ads but the others I mentioned and the ones you mentioned all show/play ads for the free tier.

            I guess OpenAI will be pretty keen to get ads into their free tier too, once they run out of investors’ money.