The annualized revenue of OpenAI's ChatGPT advertising business has topped $1 billion (about 1.4 trillion won) roughly 200 days after the service launched. As OpenAI pursues an initial public offering (IPO), analysts say the company is cultivating advertising as a new revenue source alongside subscriptions and enterprise services.
OpenAI said on the 31st (local time) that the annualized revenue of ChatGPT ads, now running in more than 40 countries, has reached $1 billion. It has been about 200 days since ads were first introduced in the United States on Feb. 9.
That is about 2.5% of OpenAI's total annualized revenue of $40 billion, which was disclosed to the press on the 14th.
OpenAI said that tens of thousands of advertisers are using its ad platform. OpenAI explained, "Advertising forms one pillar of our diversified business model, along with consumer subscriptions, enterprise services, and usage-based application programming interfaces (APIs)."
The company also stressed that because everything from information search to product and service review to decision-making takes place within a single conversation through ChatGPT, ad effectiveness can be high. It added that some advertisers achieved triple the revenue after running ads for just 28 days.
OpenAI said, "We plan to expand ChatGPT ads to more markets and introduce new ad formats, objectives, buying options, and performance measurement features." It added that even when ads are served, they do not affect ChatGPT's answers and are displayed clearly separated from responses, noting that maintaining user trust is the top principle.
Observers see OpenAI's disclosure of its ad revenue performance as an effort to highlight results to investors as it pushes for an initial public offering (IPO).
OpenAI, which has grown mainly with individual users, has been viewed as trailing competitor Anthropic—whose client base skews toward corporations—in revenue growth. It appears to be seeking a new growth driver by expanding its advertising business using ChatGPT's user base.
Anthropic, by contrast, even ran a large-scale video campaign satirizing AI chatbots with ads and declared it would not attach ads to its AI model Claude. Google is also not applying ads to Gemini, suggesting OpenAI is likely to lead the market for the time being.
OpenAI displays ads to ChatGPT free users and subscribers to the low-priced "Go" plan, and it began offering ads in Korea in June.