The thing inside ChatGPT that answers your questions is now also a place you can buy ads against. OpenAI confirmed this month that its self-serve Ads Manager has opened to all US businesses, with cost-per-click bidding alongside the existing CPM option, no minimum spend, and ads served to Free and Go tier users in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The $50,000 minimum that gated the original pilot is gone. The agency partner list includes Dentsu and Omnicom. The tech partner list includes Adobe and Criteo. The training wheels are off.
OpenAI says it is aiming for $2.5 billion in ad revenue this year and $100 billion annually by 2030. The second number is worth holding next to some other numbers. Google’s total ad business did roughly $237 billion in 2023. Meta did roughly $132 billion. Reaching $100 billion in ChatGPT ad revenue inside five years would put OpenAI’s ad business at close to where Meta’s was the year before ChatGPT shipped. That is the projection on the slide. Whether anyone executes on it is a separate question.
The pitch behind the math is the obvious one. ChatGPT has a lot of users and approximately zero ad load, so even modest per-session monetization compounds to nine figures fast. The carved-out user privacy commitment, that conversations stay private from advertisers and paid users see no ads at all, is doing the work of insisting this is fine, actually. The interesting part will be what the unit looks like in practice. CPC and CPM are buying mechanisms. The placement itself, whether a sponsored citation inside an answer, a sidebar card, a “people also bought,” or something not yet invented, is what will define whether this feels like the open web getting one more ad layer or something stranger.
The bet is that it will feel less weird than people initially fear and slightly weirder than is comfortable. That is roughly how every ad surface in the last twenty years has felt.