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Generating AI content is expensive, so how are developers actually making a profit?
Monetization strategies for when compute costs are too high
As long as capitalism is a thing, humans will always have an instinctive desire to cash in on the latest technological gold rush. It happened with the web in the 90s, it happened in the late 2010s with cryptocurrency, and it’s happening now with generative AI.
If you’re brave enough to risk ruining your YouTube recommendation algorithm with a search for “passive income”, you’ll undoubtedly come across a wall of thumbnail clickbait from content creators peddling AI-based ‘get-rich-quick’ schemes, which focus on making a quick profit from selling generated content to existing marketplaces, such as Etsy.
While this tactic is questionable in a content-saturated market, developers are cashing in on the emerging niche of creating the tools that generate this AI content. Better yet, developers are making apps that use generative AI to compete with or extend features of existing software platforms.