Absolute Return

🦔 Microsoft and Google are paying influencers between $400,000 and $600,000 for long-term partnerships to promote their AI tools on social media. Anthropic, Meta, and OpenAI are running similar campaigns. Some creators charge up to $100,000 per post. AI companies spent over $1 billion on digital ads in the US last year, up 126% from 2024. Digital ad spending by Google and Microsoft to promote AI products jumped 495% last month compared to a year ago. One agency founder: "Some of these bigger companies have so much money to spend that they don't care to negotiate." My Take When you're spending half a million dollars to get an influencer to post about your chatbot, you're not confident the product sells itself. These are companies burning tens of billions on infrastructure while struggling to get users to pay for subscriptions. Only 3.3% of Microsoft 365 users pay for Copilot. OpenAI just started running ads because they need revenue. Now they're flooding social media with paid promotions. What gives me some hope is the creators turning down the money. One guy with 7 million followers said he wouldn't take $500,000 to promote AI image tools because he can't support something that makes it harder for normal people to make a living. Roughly half of US adults say they're more concerned than excited about AI. The backlash is strongest around tools that generate images or video, the ones that most directly replace creative work. You can pay influencers to say AI is cool. You can't pay them to make people believe it. Hedgie🤗