Ryan Hudson Talks LLM Ads, OpenAI Marketplace, and Why Last-Click Must Change

We sent out an open call for readers to submit anonymous questions to Ryan Hudson, Founder of ZeroClick and Pie, and Co-Founder of Honey.

Hudson is a figure perennially on the boundary of affiliate and digital marketing, whether that be innovating the browser extension model with Honey, or the adblocker format with Pie, to now pursuing his ambitious mission to build the monetisation layer for LLMs.

You can watch our full interview with Hudson below. But if you’re in a rush, you can read some highlights too.

How will ZeroClick work?

The LLM ad space remains an unmapped territory; we still don’t really know how it will work.

If you look at Google Search, there are paid search results for basically any term you plug into it.

Will LLM ads work the same way – are users going to be inundated with sponsored replies for every single prompt?

Hudson says, “It depends on the use case.”

The way ZeroClick works is by analysing the contexts of LLM conversations and helping ads surface at relevant times.

For example, if someone has built a shopping-specific AI environment, they would be more inclined to engage with sponsored responses; whereas ads throughout a therapist version of a chatbot would be malapropos.