OpenAI Expands Ads, Putting ChatGPT Users in the Sales Funnel

OpenAI will bring ChatGPT Ads to 26 more countries, where free users and Go subscribers will begin seeing advertisements alongside a service they use to explore needs and make decisions. The expansion lifts the advertising business to 89 countries worldwide. Users get the ads; the company gets another growing revenue stream.

A Wider Market for Ads

The new rollout includes Argentina, Peru, Nigeria, South Africa and Ukraine. OpenAI says advertisements remain separate from ChatGPT’s responses to prompts, don’t influence its answers and carry clear labels. Those are the company’s assurances as it brings advertising into more people’s interactions with its chatbot.

OpenAI has called its eight-month-old advertising product a new business pillar, alongside enterprise contracts, consumer subscriptions and usage-based application programming interfaces, or APIs. Digital advertising has long generated major revenue for companies including Google and Meta. ChatGPT’s expansion puts another large technology company’s commercial ambitions directly beside a service people use to find information and weigh options.

The figures chart a rapid climb. OpenAI said its advertising operation hit a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate in August, up from $100 million in March. The company said more than 100,000 advertisers had run campaigns on the platform. OpenAI began testing ads in the United States in February.

The available account describes no grassroots or community response, and reports no mutual-aid effort or horizontal organizing. Instead, the expansion centers on the company, its advertisers and its plan to turn more ChatGPT interactions into commercial opportunities.

Companies Compete for the Same Attention

Anthropic made OpenAI’s advertising push the focus of its first Super Bowl campaign, pledging to keep its competing chatbot, Claude, ad-free. The rivalry gives users a contrast between business models, as both companies prepare for initial public offerings widely expected to be major. Neither company has publicly disclosed when it plans to debut.

OpenAI executives have signaled they’re weighing a 2027 listing. Anthropic’s leaders have met with prospective investors in recent weeks. The companies are competing over chatbot features and over how their products will make money and draw investors.

OpenAI says it plans to build additional ad formats, measurement capabilities and buying options. It’s also exploring new ways for businesses to interact natively with ChatGPT consumers. Advertisers’ needs now sit inside the company’s next product decisions, while free users and Go subscribers will see the expanding ads.

Meta’s AI Spending Under Investor Watch

Meta was set to report third-quarter earnings after the market closed Wednesday. Analysts polled by LSEG expected earnings per share of $5.75 and revenue of $63.2 billion. Investors wanted signs that the company’s artificial-intelligence efforts could support future sales.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Muse AI personal assistant debuted in September and climbed to the top of Apple’s iOS App Store. Its early success helped Meta finish September with its best month on Wall Street since 2022. Facebook and Instagram have helped bring AI agents to a wide audience, and Meta and its AI chief, Alexandr Wang, have kept releasing foundation models and updates, including Muse Wonder, released the previous Monday.

Investors also planned to watch Meta’s data-center capital expenditures, the spending that supports computing infrastructure for AI agents and foundation models. In July, following its second-quarter earnings, Meta narrowed its 2026 capex guidance to between $130 billion and $145 billion, lifting the low end of its previous range by $5 billion. Free cash flow in that period dropped to $784 million from $8.55 billion in the same quarter a year earlier. FactSet analysts expected Meta’s capex to reach $196.3 billion in 2027.

Meta’s third-quarter daily active people, or DAP, was expected to reach 3.65 billion, according to StreetAccount, almost flat from the prior quarter. The measure counts users across Meta’s family of apps, including Facebook and Instagram. OpenAI summed up its commercial pitch this way: “Our goal is to make ads useful to people as they pursue their goals and make decisions — and effective for the businesses that advertise with us.”