OpenAI ad push and Sora sunset

OpenAI is telling investors it could make $2.5 billion from ads in 2026 and $100 billion by 2030, which would turn ChatGPT from a subscription product into something closer to a search-and-ads machine. The same investor pitch assumes OpenAI’s products reach 2.75 billion weekly users by 2030. (axios.com) (finance.yahoo.com) That number only works if OpenAI can prove ads inside a chat box do more than sit there. Adweek reported that code inside OpenAI’s ads manager points to conversion tracking, which is the system advertisers use to see whether a person actually bought something after clicking. (adweek.com) (searchengineland.com) Conversion tracking is what separates a digital billboard from a cash register. Google Search became huge because a shoe ad next to “best running shoes” could be tied to a sale, and OpenAI appears to be building the same kind of measuring tape for ChatGPT. (adweek.com) (searchengineland.com) OpenAI is not starting from a blank page here. Search Engine Land reported that OpenAI confirmed it had begun testing an Ads Manager dashboard with a small group of partners, giving marketers tools to launch and monitor campaigns around ChatGPT. (searchengineland.com) The hard part is that chat does not behave like search. In search, a person types “buy tennis racket” and expects links; in chat, a person asks for advice in full sentences, which makes ads feel less like a sidebar and more like an interruption unless they are tightly matched to the conversation. (adweek.com) (axios.com) At the same time OpenAI is building that ad business, it is closing one of its own consumer products. OpenAI’s help center says the Sora web and app experience will be discontinued on April 26, 2026, and the Sora application programming interface, which is the developer connection that lets other software call Sora, will end on September 24, 2026. (help.openai.com) OpenAI is also telling users to export their Sora data before the app shutdown, which usually means access to hosted projects and assets will not be guaranteed once the consumer product goes dark. That is a practical warning for creators who treated Sora like a permanent studio instead of a temporary tool. (help.openai.com) Put together, the two moves show where OpenAI looks steadier and where it looks less committed. Ads inside ChatGPT point toward a giant recurring revenue engine, while Sora’s shutdown shows that experimental creative products can still be cut on a fixed calendar even when they carry a well-known brand name. (axios.com) (help.openai.com) For users, the immediate change is simple. If ChatGPT becomes more measurable for advertisers, more commercial prompts will likely attract performance ads, and if you built a workflow around Sora, the dates that matter are April 26, 2026 for the app and September 24, 2026 for the application programming interface. (adweek.com) (help.openai.com)