The advertising industry has spent decades perfecting the art of the optimistic metric, that particular alchemy by which a single good month becomes an annualized triumph. OpenAI, it seems, has been paying attention.
The company behind ChatGPT announced that its advertising business has reached a $1 billion "run rate" — a figure arrived at by the time-honored method of multiplying current monthly revenue by 12 and hoping no one asks too many questions about seasonality. The milestone, such as it is, comes less than 200 days after OpenAI began selling ads in its chatbot application.
"We're at the beginning of a new chapter for advertising, with AI creating entirely new ways for businesses and people to discover one another," said Dave Dugan, vice president of global ad solutions at OpenAI. (What, you were expecting him to say they were at the end?)
The announcement coincides with OpenAI's expansion of self-serve advertising access across 31 European markets, a rollout that began earlier this month through select agency partners and opened more broadly on Friday. The self-serve platform allows advertisers to build and manage campaigns directly, without agency intermediaries — though Mr. Dugan was careful to note that agencies remain available for marketers who prefer that arrangement, which is to say, for marketers whose companies require them to have someone else to blame.
The approach mirrors what OpenAI has done in the United States: advertisers in approved categories whose creative clears policy review may buy directly through the company's ads manager.
For an industry that has spent the past two years oscillating between terror and rapture over artificial intelligence, the news offers a data point of sorts. Whether it represents the beginning of something large or merely the latest entry in the annals of extrapolated revenue remains, for now, a matter of multiplication.
Original story published in Digiday: "OpenAI's ChatGPT ads business hits $1 billion run rate as Europe gets self-serve access"