OpenAI says ChatGPT ads now run at $1 billion a year as Europe gets self-serve buying

OpenAI says its advertising business has reached an annual run rate of $1 billion. Run rate means one month’s income multiplied by twelve. The company said this on August 31, less than 200 days after it began testing ads inside ChatGPT. On the same day it opened self-serve campaign buying, meaning advertisers can set campaigns up themselves, in 31 European markets. Those cover every EU country plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.

The run rate looks forward rather than back. It takes the current month’s ad income, about $83 million by Digiday’s estimate, and multiplies it by twelve. The money actually taken since the trial began in February is probably closer to $330 million. Even so, the pace is unusual for a platform that only launched an ads manager in March and added AppsFlyer measurement in August.

Dave Dugan, OpenAI’s vice president of global ad solutions, said the European rollout “opens that opportunity to businesses of every size.” Until now European brands could only buy through the company’s sales team or through a short list of large agency groups. That list includes Publicis, Omnicom, WPP, Havas, Dentsu and Mediaplus.

ChatGPT ads reached European users on 24 August in limited form

Ads in ChatGPT went live for European users on August 24, but in a deliberately limited form. In the European Economic Area and Switzerland the ads are shown only to people on the Free and Go plans. They are matched to the current conversation, the rough location and the language, not to past chats or stored memories. Ads matched to the individual person are planned as a second stage, once users have accepted updated privacy terms. That reflects GDPR, the EU data protection law, which asks companies to get clear consent.

The size of the audience is what draws media buyers. According to Adweek, OpenAI now has more than 1 billion people using ChatGPT each week. Chief marketing officer Colin Fleming has said about one in five of their questions shows an intention to buy something. Links with Adobe, Criteo and LiveRamp are meant to make the tracking of results look familiar to performance teams.

OpenAI aims for $2.3 to $2.5 billion in ad income in 2026

The milestone still leaves OpenAI well short of its own plans. Reports put the company’s ad income goal for 2026 at $2.3 billion to $2.5 billion, and its longer-term target at $100 billion by 2030. That would need growth no ad platform has kept up before. Nate Elliott, an analyst at eMarketer, argues that OpenAI may in time match Google and Meta on partnerships and tools, but that building all of that takes years the company may not have. For Polish advertisers the change is immediate. A ChatGPT campaign can now be set up with a company credit card instead of through a media agency. Because the targeting follows only the conversation for now, early campaigns may behave more like search ads than social ones.