OpenAI is expanding advertising on ChatGPT to 26 more countries, taking the total to 89, Reuters reported on Wednesday. The company announced the rollout itself as it builds out an ads business it is counting on for revenue ahead of a potential initial public offering.
The expansion is heavily weighted toward markets OpenAI had not yet reached with ads. Fourteen of the new countries are in Latin America, including Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru, following earlier launches in Mexico and Brazil. The rest spread across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, among them Nigeria, South Africa, Serbia, Ukraine, Cambodia, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
Who Sees The Ads, And How Advertisers Buy In
As in the existing markets, ads appear only on ChatGPT’s Free and Go plans. Plus, Pro and Enterprise subscriptions remain ad-free, which keeps the paid tiers as the escape hatch for users who do not want advertising inside their conversations. That split is the commercial core of the product: the free audience is the inventory, and the subscriptions are the alternative OpenAI sells to anyone who objects.
Advertisers in the new markets can reach ChatGPT two ways. They can buy through OpenAI’s technology partners in-market, or take self-service access through Ads Manager on OpenAI’s own platform. OpenAI began testing ads in ChatGPT in the United States earlier this year, and the company says more than 100,000 advertisers have since run campaigns on the platform — a figure that will now be tested against dozens of smaller and more price-sensitive advertising markets.
The Numbers Behind The Expansion
OpenAI said in August that its ads business had reached an annualised revenue run rate of $1 billion. That number explains the pace of the geographic rollout: an ads product confined to a few dozen wealthy markets cannot grow much past its first billion, while the Free and Go user base in Latin America, Africa and South Asia is where ChatGPT’s unpaid audience is largest. In September the company also introduced AI-powered tools for advertisers and began testing business-sponsored agents with select US advertisers.
The international expansion lands on top of a fast-changing advertiser product. OpenAI told advertisers this month that ChatGPT Ads creative enhancements will switch on by default from October 30, and an earlier update added wider visual cards, a redesigned conversions page and weekly performance emails. Measurement, the weak point of any new ad platform, is also under scrutiny: OpenAI recently confirmed that a spell of missing UTM tags on ChatGPT clicks was a bug, after advertisers and analytics firms flagged referral traffic that had become harder to measure.
Why It Matters
ChatGPT’s ads expansion matters because it decides whether conversational AI gets a second business model at global scale. Subscriptions alone have never funded the largest free audiences in technology; advertising has, from search to social. By taking the total to 89 countries while keeping every paid tier ad-free, OpenAI is drawing the same line Google and Meta drew before it — free users see the ads, paying users buy their way out — but inside a chat interface where a sponsored answer sits closer to the advice itself than a search ad ever did. For advertisers in the new markets, the offer is early access to an audience their competitors have not yet priced; for regulators and publishers in those markets, the questions about labelling, measurement and how much of the free product becomes a storefront now arrive all at once, rather than one country at a time.
Background
OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022 as a free research preview and built its consumer business on subscriptions, adding paid tiers while the free version carried the growth. Advertising arrived much later, with US testing earlier this year, as the cost of serving hundreds of millions of free users met the company’s need to show a broadening revenue base ahead of a possible IPO. The $1 billion annualised run rate disclosed in August was the first hard figure attached to that bet; the 89-country map is the second.
Source: Reuters
0 Comments