ChatGPT's ad business reaches a $1bn annualised run rate

OpenAI said its ChatGPT advertising business had reached a $1 billion annualised revenue run rate, around 200 days after it began testing ads with a first cohort of US users in February. The figure is a run rate — current monthly ad revenue multiplied by twelve — rather than revenue actually collected over a year, and OpenAI did not disclose the underlying monthly number.

Alongside the milestone, OpenAI said self-serve ad buying, which had launched in the US, was being extended to more than 40 additional countries including India and markets across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and that tens of thousands of advertisers were now using the platform. The company reiterated commitments made when ads first appeared — that placements are visually separated from and do not influence ChatGPT’s own responses, and that advertisers do not get access to users’ conversations.

The run rate gives the first concrete indication of how quickly OpenAI’s advertising business — introduced as a way to subsidise free and low-cost tiers rather than fund the company through subscriptions and enterprise sales alone — was scaling, at a point when OpenAI’s overall costs, chiefly from compute for training and inference, were reported to run far ahead of revenue from any single line of business. It remains a small fraction of OpenAI’s total revenue, but establishes advertising as a growing and now separately reported component of it.