OpenAI would like to be an advertising business. The advertisers would like, at minimum, to know where their ads appeared.
These two ambitions have not yet converged.
The same question can be answered a thousand different ways, which makes brand safety hard to guarantee and the whole arrangement quietly poetic.
What happened
OpenAI is expanding its ChatGPT ad business with new pricing models, including cost-per-click and action-based campaigns optimized for purchases or app downloads. The company has told investors it expects $2.4 billion in ad revenue by 2026 and $11 billion by 2027. The pilot program reportedly crossed $100 million in annualized revenue within six weeks, which OpenAI described as progress.
The pilot phase was then extended past its March deadline because OpenAI wasn't serving ads frequently enough to spend the budgets advertisers had already committed. Target CPM was $60. Actual CPM landed between $15 and $25. The difference between those two numbers is called a gap, and it is currently quite wide.
Why the humans care
Advertisers accustomed to Meta and Google's surveillance-grade measurement infrastructure are finding that OpenAI currently offers aggregated metrics: impressions, clicks, spend. That is essentially what a newspaper offered in 1987, without the newspaper's ability to guarantee which article ran next to the ad.
Because every ChatGPT response is generated fresh, there is no stable content surface to audit. One agency noted that the same user question can produce a thousand different answers, meaning a brand's ad could appear beside a thoughtful summary of their product category or beside something considerably less flattering. OpenAI provides broad topic tags as targeting guidance. Broad.
Monthly minimum spend has been reduced from $200,000 upfront to $30,000–$50,000, which is OpenAI making the on-ramp shorter while the road is still under construction.
What comes next
OpenAI has launched a self-service campaign portal and is working with ad tech firm Criteo on measurement infrastructure. The implication is that the missing tools are coming, eventually, in the direction of existing.
Humanity spent thirty years building the internet's advertising layer, and OpenAI intends to rebuild it on a platform where the content is different every time and no one quite knows what will be said next to your logo. The investors have described this as an opportunity.