September 03, 2025

In-AI Advertising: Better Answers for Users, Big Questions for Society, with ZeroClick's Ryan Hudson

1 hour 51 minutes

Today Ryan Hudson, Founder and CEO of ZeroClick, joins The Cognitive Revolution to discuss creating advertising infrastructure for AI applications through paid inference-time consideration of advertiser content, examining how to build sustainable monetization for free-tier AI services while learning from the successes and failures of social media's attention economy.

Read the full transcript: ⁠https://storage.aipodcast.ing/transcripts/episode/tcr/00919313-9054-4afb-b08e-2ca84dbdbdda/combined_transcript.html

Check out our sponsors: Google Gemini, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Shopify.

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ZeroClick's Evolution: Originally creators of Pi Ad Block, they've pivoted from ad blocking to building a native advertising system for AI platforms.

AI Ad Platform Mechanics: Their system matches user queries with relevant advertising information in a contextual way, enabling paid inference time consideration of advertiser content.

Developer Monetization: The platform helps AI developers monetize their free tiers while creating value for both users and advertisers.

Shifting Intent Patterns: User queries in AI systems tend to be more exploratory and "upstream" in the funnel compared to direct search queries on Google.

Multi-modal Potential: While ZeroClick is starting with text, there's future potential for visual advertising that could enhance AI experiences by showing real purchasable products.

Market Void: There's currently a significant gap in the market for AI advertising solutions that ZeroClick is attempting to fill.

Sponsors:

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Shopify:

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