Monologue: ChatGPT's Growth Is Collapsing In Europe

In this week’s Better Offline monologue, Ed Zitron walks you through data from Deutsche Bank that shows ChatGPT’s growth is flatlining in Europe, and how advertising isn’t going to save OpenAI. OpenAI’s ‘flatlining’ subs in Europe: The AI boom’s poster child may be struggling to recruit new subscribers, Deutsche Bank warns https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-flatlining-subs-europe-ai-145343677.html Get $10 off a year’s subscription to my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/w08jbm4jwg YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:36Ed Zitron?

  Call Zone Media.

• 0:40Ed Zitron?

  Hello and welcome to this week's Better Offline monologue. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

• 0:48Speaker 03

  Better Offline.

• 0:51Ed Zitron?

  And sorry that there hasn't been a monologue for a few weeks. These massive episodes I've been putting together took up my time in a way that made them a little impractical. And as far as the show goes, I know it's been very AI-focused. I can't even say AI right sometimes. But anyway, this is likely gonna continue for a while, because as you can tell from the news, crazy shit keeps happening every day. Every day Sam Altman tells somebody he's gonna give them a billion dollars. It's all so silly, and I do feel like it's not being covered very thoroughly, so I'm doing my best to do so. Nevertheless, I promise I'm going to find a way to bring in more non-AI stuff. I'm not really sure how it's gonna make it in there. I'll do my best. And I'm already working on CES

• 1:32Ed Zitron?

  2026, which I think is gonna be probably the best tech podcast thing ever. Got some incredible guests, Chloe Radcliffe, of course, Edward Anguoso Jr., David Roth. And yeah, those guests I can't quite talk about yet, but they're gonna make you really happy. And it's gonna be about more than just AI. That being said, next week's episode is likely to be AI-focused, as I've had a lot of people request to do an episode that's a simplified guide to the AI bubble, something that they can share with people that aren't sticking their head in the technological or financial septic tank every day. And look, I think you're gonna love it. You can, please, listen to it anyway. I need the downloads. But in all seriousness, I think it's gonna be some- Thing and I've been working on it for a few days now that's quite short and sharp. But will speak to people who are not technical or financial at all.

• 2:17Ed Zitron?

  I think it'll be great and if not, eh, show's free, you'll enjoy it. But I also do just wanna say, I really appreciate how many of you listen every week. I really appreciate your patience with the AI stuff. You seem to all really enjoy it, but I do love from, love to hear from you whenever I can, so. Reach out, please don't be too mean though, I do have a heart. But yes, this week's monologue is somewhat of a big story. So two days ago, Fortune published a story saying that, according to data from Deutsche Bank, which is a very, very large bank. That OpenAI's subscription growth in Europe has stalled and is, and I quote. Flatlining in the major European markets over the past four months. To quote Fortune, the data was drawn from transactions processed by third-party financial institutions.

• 3:01Ed Zitron?

  Really nailed that word in the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain, representing fifteen percent of ChatGPT users. And if you're wondering, the top software markets in the world are US, China, Germany, UK, France and Italy. And then there's Canada and some others. To be clear, this specifically refers to people paying for ChatGPT subscriptions, the twenty buck a month one most likely. And in a graph I'll link to in the show notes, you really should look at it. OpenAI's subscription growth in Europe has been pretty rocky from the beginning, dropping from ten percent. In June twenty twenty-three to below zero percent in August twenty twenty-three, meaning growth had declined, only to recover slightly. Well, pretty well, I guess, the twenty percent in December twenty twenty-three, then drop again to below zero percent in February twenty twenty-four.

• 3:42Ed Zitron?

  Otherwise, OpenAI barely scraped ten percent growth outside of some spikes in September twenty twenty-four. Around the launch of their reasoning models, which got them to about fifteen percent. The launch of their useless agent operator in January twenty twenty-five, which got them somehow to around eighteen percent. And then the launch of O4 image generation in March twenty twenty-five, which by the way was the Studio Ghibli wank. And that got them back to only ten percent though. I realized that was a lot of numbers and like I said, the chart is in the episode notes, I swear. But in June twenty twenty-five, OpenAI faced negative growth of subscribers in Europe, barely recovering to two to three percent in July twenty twenty-five. And then back to zero percent in August twenty twenty-five, which looks like there may be a mild recovery coming to around three percent in September.

• 4:27Ed Zitron?

  Now, while I'm not quite declaring victory or blasting "not like us", I am having trouble finding a way around how bad this is. I can find no example of a successful software revolution that started with high growth and tumbled into the abyss in Europe. It didn't happen with Facebook, and it certainly didn't happen in Uber's case, even though European governments actively tried to reject it, and some of them still are. It didn't happen with the smartphone, or cloud computing, or really any other software revolution or device. They would start from kind of nowhere, and then grow, and then there'd be wobbles, but they'd keep growing steadily. This is a steady decline. And to be clear, this has nothing to do with Europe's general data protection regulations, or the GDPR, Robert Evans once taught me to spell everything out. I've independently confirmed with European chat GPT users

• 5:12Ed Zitron?

  that the product is basically identical over there. Europe just happens to be rejecting chat GPT. They don't want to pay for it. And as you'll see when you look at the graph, the boosts that OpenAI gets from throwing out new products, they're becoming less pronounced each time. Other than operator, that one kind of surprised me, but even then, 18% growth? And I think it's month over month. If it's year over year, it wouldn't be year over year, it's month over month. Now, the GDPR, by the way, will make it difficult for OpenAI to launch advertising, which I will add, will not be the saving grace for this company, because Google and Meta's massive advertising revenues come from decades of data and expertise in forcing them down customers' throats, as well as having a very compelling product and thousands of salespeople. And also, in Google's case, thousands of miles of underground cable,

• 5:56Ed Zitron?

  and under-the-sea cable, I believe, as well. People that are easily scared are suggesting that OpenAI's data on users is rich, because they feed so much into it. This point makes the assumption that this data is useful, and that OpenAI can actually do anything with it, despite having absolutely no expertise in selling ads. As a reminder, perplexity, the AI search engine you'd think would be the perfect place for ads, they made 20 grand, $20,000 selling ads in 2024. That's bollocks, it's terrible. You'd make more selling dogs. Anyone watch The Day Today? Might be auctioning dogs. Anyway, my rambling aside, it's very easy to get scared of this company and just think, "Oh, they have a lot of money and users, even though they lose billions. They'll just put ads in, and that'll fix everything." I must caution you to immediately be a doomer there.

• 6:42Ed Zitron?

  I see no real evidence that they're going to find another business line. And mostly evidence by the fact they've never been able to find one. And while this isn't declarative proof that this company is circling the drain, I don't know how else to look at it as anything other than their growth story in Europe is dying. And they're building a goddamn data center in England, I think, with N scale, a company that's never built an AI data center in their life. To be fair, that's also the case with Crusoe. In fact, all of OpenAI's partners pretty much never built a data center of any kind, other than crypto ones, which are completely different. Also, no one's built a gig what data center. Ah, that's going to be a future episode. Forgive me, I want to educate you on data centers one day, but every time I start thinking about them, my brain starts playing the, uh, that music from Kill Bill when she looks at anyone she's mad at.

• 7:27Ed Zitron?

  Someone's going to email me and say, Perry Mason? Christ, the great thing about these monologues is I could just talk about whatever I want to. They say I should do this, which is what I'm gonna do. But in reality, back to the thing we're talking about. It really is hard to read this as anything other than air escaping the bubble. It's been pissed, I swear to God. And perhaps it's the era of smiles beginning. A specter is haunting Silicon Valley, the face of the smiling man. And I hope you'll join me every week to find out how this shit bursts or, I don't know, whatever crazy crap Sam Altman promises next.

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