OpenAI ad push

OpenAI is no longer treating ChatGPT like a subscription app with a side business. Investor materials described by Axios say the company expects about $2.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2026 and about $100 billion by 2030. (axios.com) (reuters.com) Those same projections climb fast: about $11 billion in 2027, $25 billion in 2028, and $53 billion in 2029. The pitch to investors assumes OpenAI products reach 2.75 billion weekly users by 2030, which is the scale you need if you want to sell ads like Google and Meta do. (reuters.com) (usnews.com) This did not start with banner ads pasted onto a chatbot. OpenAI has been building shopping inside ChatGPT, where the assistant asks follow-up questions, compares products, and produces buyer’s guides for logged-in users on web and mobile. (openai.com) OpenAI also set up a merchant program that asks stores to share product feeds so their items can appear when users are deciding what to buy. That turns ChatGPT from a place that answers questions into a place that can steer shopping intent at the exact moment a person is comparing options. (chatgpt.com) (openai.com) The new piece is the ad machinery behind that shopping layer. Adweek reported that OpenAI has been testing an Ads Manager with a small group of partners, and an OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the company is gathering feedback while testers receive campaign reports. (adweek.com) (searchengineland.com) Code found in that system points to conversion tracking, which is the tool advertisers use to see whether an ad led to a sale, a sign-up, or another measurable action. That is a different business from simple brand awareness, because it lets marketers judge ChatGPT the way they judge search ads: by whether money put in produces money out. (adweek.com) OpenAI appears to be copying the most valuable part of search advertising rather than the oldest part of display advertising. A person who types “best running shoes for flat feet under $150” is already close to buying, and a person asking ChatGPT the same thing in full sentences may be even further down the funnel. (openai.com) (adweek.com) That helps explain why OpenAI is building ads around conversation instead of around pages. In a chatbot, the assistant can ask your budget, your size, and your use case before showing products, which gives advertisers cleaner signals than a single search box often does. (openai.com) The hard part is that Google already owns the market for measurable intent, and Meta already owns the market for targeted performance at scale. OpenAI is trying to wedge itself between them by turning natural-language questions into shopping queries and then proving those queries convert. (reuters.com) (adweek.com) If OpenAI hits even a fraction of its 2030 target, ChatGPT stops looking like a paid assistant with some commerce features and starts looking like a new ad platform with an assistant attached. The investor math says the company is planning for the second version. (axios.com) (reuters.com)