a couple of years ago Sam Altman said that placing ads on ChatGPT was “the last resort for our business model.” Well then, ChatGPT ads are here and OpenAI is sure that it will be the business of the century, one that will generate a whopping $100 billion.
what has happened. He leaked it Axios; During a presentation with investors, OpenAI has confirmed its forecasts for the newly released advertising model in ChatGPT. During 2026 they expect to generate 2.5 billion dollars and this will increase in the coming years until reaching 100 billion in 2030. This is the progression they project:
- 2026: 2.5 billion
- 2027: 11,000 million
- 2028: 25,000 million
- 2029: 53,000 million
Why it is important. Advertising has gone from being the last resort of its business model to directly being its business model. OpenAI is losing money at an unsustainable rate and has been making profound changes to be more profitable, such as focus more on enterprise customers, but it may be too late. Advertising is your way to profitability. In other words, your survival depends on this going well.
butterfly effect. If it works for them and they achieve their goal, it can change the rules of online advertising. 100,000 million is many millions, enough for Google and Meta’s business to end up being affected. Furthermore, advertising within a chatbot like ChatGPT can be much more profitable because the user says in a much more direct and detailed way what they are looking for. On the other hand, advertising on Instagram or Google Ads requires work to collect data to guess the user’s tastes.
If it doesn’t work for them, the outlook looks bad for the technology sector. We talk about the most valuable private company in the world and Its possible bankruptcy can cause a domino effect that freezes investments and punctures the expectations placed on AI.
Users. To achieve these numbers, OpenAI estimates that it needs its weekly user base to reach 2.75 billion by 2030. Right now ChatGPT has 900 million weekly active usersthat is, they have to triple them in four years. We talked about ChatGPT having to be at the level of WhatsApp or YouTube.
There is already 6 billion people with internet accessAs far as there are users, the question is whether it is feasible for OpenAI to attract almost half of them. The mass adoption of AI is already in a more mature phase and, although it is the most used, ChatGPT is no longer the pretty girl; Now it coexists with equally capable competitors and most importantly: The image of the company has been eroding.
The double edge of advertising. Advertising can be tremendously lucrative for OpenAI, but it puts user trust at risk, and that is just what they need to fulfill their plans. We have normalized seeing ads everywhere, but having them appear in a conversation with a chatbot threatens to erode their main promise: to be assistants that respond solely to the user’s interest, and not to the commercial priorities of those who pay to advertise.
Two things can happen here: that the rest of the AI companies jump on the bandwagon and we normalize that the free versions have ads (the ideal scenario for OpenAI), or that OpenAI is left alone and people end up going to other ad-free chatbots. Anthropic said it would not advertisewe will see if in a few years they continue to maintain it.
Image | Xataka
In Xataka | Before, advertising was to monetize. Now it is to punish you and YouTube has taken it to the extreme
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