OpenAI Wants $200K From Brands to Advertise on ChatGPT, Says Adweek Exclusive Reporting

OpenAI is officially rolling out a beta ad program on ChatGPT, asking select advertisers for a minimum commitment of $200,000 as it begins to monetize its massive user base, as first reported by Adweek. The move is a direct challenge to Google’s dominance in search advertising.

• A shot across the bow: With 810 million monthly active users, the program has the scale to create a new "prompt-first" advertising market, potentially siphoning billions in revenue from traditional search. For now, the experiment is tightly controlled, with OpenAI focused on learning what kind of advertising users find valuable before scaling up.

• Building a walled garden: To avoid user backlash, the company is keeping the ads on a short leash. They are contextual, kept separate from the AI's answers, and won't appear for paid users, minors, or on sensitive topics, with all user conversations remaining private.

• The price of admission: While the official minimum buy-in is $200,000, some brands have been asked for more; Adweek reports four clients of Adthena, a search intelligence platform, faced a $250,000 price tag. The initiative remains a high-wire act, as advertisers grapple with measurement in a clickless environment and the recent failure of competitor Perplexity's ad model highlights the risk.

OpenAI's success will hinge on whether it can prove advertising can be an "additive" feature. More ad formats are on the horizon, but only after the company figures out how to make them genuinely useful to the user experience.