Why ChatGPT’s prompt box has Meta up at night
ChatGPT's massive user engagement threatens Meta's ad revenue by capturing user attention away from social feeds.Summary
ChatGPT has become a major internet destination, attracting over 800 million registered users who spend an average of 14 minutes daily interacting with it. Meta views OpenAI as its 'deepest competitor' not over technology, but over scarce user attention, which fuels Meta's $160 billion ad empire. Every minute spent in the prompt box is time not spent scrolling through Meta's platforms, directly impacting ad impressions, especially for Instagram, which is projected to generate significant domestic ad revenue.
Furthermore, ChatGPT is fulfilling social needs—offering validation, dialogue, and even companionship—that users previously sought on social timelines. While Facebook relies on a vast social graph for comparison, ChatGPT offers an atomized, private relationship with a personalized model that remembers user context and style. This intimacy, built on memory retrieval and persona prompts, removes the social middleman. If even a fraction of Meta's billions of users shift their engagement to these chatbots, the financial impact on ad inventory will be substantial, causing concern within Meta.
(Source：CryptoSlate)