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OpenAI’s advertising business has reached a $1bn annualised revenue run rate, marking a significant new milestone for the rapidly emerging AI advertising market.
The company said on Monday that ChatGPT Ads had reached the figure as advertiser adoption grows and OpenAI expands the service internationally.
The milestone comes only months after OpenAI began testing advertising in ChatGPT in the US, underlining the speed at which AI platforms are becoming part of the advertising ecosystem.
International expansion
OpenAI is now opening its Ads Manager to advertisers in India, Europe and the Middle East and North Africa, allowing businesses in those markets to purchase ChatGPT advertising directly.
The company said advertisers outside the US represent a growing share of its advertising revenue, although it has not disclosed the precise proportion.
The expansion also points to a potentially important role for smaller advertisers. OpenAI said its Ads Manager has helped attract small and medium-sized businesses, which now account for a “material share” of its advertising business.
Ads are currently being shown to users on ChatGPT’s free tier and its lower-priced Go plan.
The rapid growth follows an earlier milestone announced by OpenAI in April, when it said the US advertising pilot had passed a $100m annualised revenue run rate within six weeks of launch.
A new competitor for Google and Meta
The scale of the business puts OpenAI firmly into the conversation alongside the established giants of digital advertising.
Its challenge is not simply to create another advertising channel, but to establish a new type of advertising environment in which users interact directly with an AI rather than navigating a traditional search results page, social feed or publisher site.
That could have significant implications for how brands discover consumer intent, target audiences and measure the value of advertising.
For Google, in particular, the rise of ChatGPT represents a challenge to the search model that has underpinned its advertising dominance for decades. Meta remains another major incumbent, with both companies generating hundreds of billions of dollars in annual advertising revenue.
OpenAI’s $1bn figure remains relatively small by comparison, but its speed of growth is likely to attract increasing attention from agencies, advertisers and the wider adtech industry.
Still short of OpenAI’s target
Despite the headline-grabbing milestone, the business is not yet on track to meet the advertising ambition OpenAI has previously set for 2026.
According to eMarketer AI analyst Nate Elliott, the $1bn annualised run rate is both impressive and disappointing because it leaves OpenAI well short of its reported $2.5bn advertising revenue target for the year.
Nevertheless, the milestone demonstrates that advertising is rapidly becoming a meaningful part of OpenAI’s commercial model.
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