ChatGPT Ads Expand to 89 Countries, Meta Reports

OpenAI said Wednesday it will bring ChatGPT Ads to 26 additional countries, taking the service to 89 nations worldwide. Free users and Go subscribers in places like Argentina, Peru, Nigeria, South Africa and Ukraine will start seeing ads inside the chatbot. That's a lot of people who never agreed to become a target market while searching for answers.

OpenAI says the ads sit apart from the product itself. They don't influence ChatGPT's responses, the company says, and the chatbot clearly labels them. “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,” the company said in a release.

The Scale of the Business

The ads product is only eight months old, but it has grown quickly. OpenAI started testing ads in the United States in February. By August, its advertising business had reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate, up from $100 million in March. More than 100,000 advertisers have run campaigns on the platform, the company said. OpenAI describes advertising as a new business pillar alongside enterprise contracts, consumer subscriptions and usage-based application programming interfaces, or APIs.

For years, digital advertising has powered companies such as Google and Meta. Now a chatbot that millions use to work through medical questions, legal problems and money decisions is joining that business model. The rivalry has grown pointed. Rival Anthropic drew attention to OpenAI's ad push by making it the focus of its first Super Bowl campaign, and pledged to keep its competing chatbot, Claude, ad-free.

Meta's Earnings Test

Meta was due 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 weren't just watching the headline numbers; they wanted evidence that the company's artificial-intelligence work could translate into 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. That 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. Meta's AI chief, Alexandr Wang, has continued releasing foundation models, including Muse Wonder, which came out the previous Monday.

The spending side of the ledger is steep. In July, following second-quarter earnings, Meta narrowed its 2026 capital expenditure guidance to between $130 billion and $145 billion, raising the low end of its previous range by $5 billion. Free cash flow fell to $784 million in that period, from $8.55 billion in the same quarter a year earlier. FactSet analysts expected Meta's capex to reach $196.3 billion in 2027. Investors were also watching for any further increase in data-center spending needed to power AI agents and foundation models.

The Users Behind the Numbers

StreetAccount expected Meta's third-quarter daily active people, or DAP, to reach 3.65 billion, nearly flat from the prior quarter. The figure counts users across Meta's family of apps, including Facebook and Instagram. At that scale, flat user growth means Meta's gains increasingly depend on how much it can extract from people already on its platforms. That's a question for regulators and the public, not just shareholders.

Both companies are also preparing for initial public offerings widely expected to be major, though neither has said when it will debut. OpenAI executives have signaled they are considering a 2027 listing, while Anthropic's leaders have met with prospective investors in recent weeks. OpenAI said it plans to develop more ChatGPT Ads formats, measurement tools and buying options, and is exploring new ways for businesses to interact directly with ChatGPT users. “As more people turn to ChatGPT to explore needs, evaluate options, and make decisions, we see an opportunity to help them discover products and services — and to help businesses of every size grow and thrive,” the company said.

Why This Matters: When people turn to a tool for health, money and legal questions, they have a direct stake in how paid placements are labeled, measured and kept apart from the answers. OpenAI says ads don't shape responses, and it has an obligation to prove that in a way outsiders can check. The expansion into 26 more countries, including several where consumer protections and data rules may be thinner, raises the stakes. Meta's spending, which one analyst estimate says could climb toward $196.3 billion in 2027, is partly financed by the same advertising model that depends on user attention. Whether that model serves users or simply monetizes them is a question democratic institutions, not just investors, should be asking now, before rules form around a business that has already scaled to a billion dollars a year.