OpenAI said on Monday that its advertising division, ChatGPT Ads, has achieved an annualized revenue run rate of $1 billion as adoption increases and the company expands globally.
As it relies on advertising to increase total revenue growth ahead of a possible IPO, the business began testing ads in ChatGPT U.S. earlier this year and has gradually expanded to include advertisers and get into more markets.
OpenAI’s Ads Manager, a service it has already launched in the US, will allow marketers in India, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa to buy ChatGPT ads directly starting on Monday.
The company stated that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMBs) now make up a “material share” of its advertising business and that Ads Manager has been useful in luring SMBs to advertise on ChatGPT.
Without providing more information, OpenAI stated that advertisers outside of the United States account for an increasing portion of revenue.
Users of ChatGPT’s free tier and the less expensive Go Plan have been seeing advertisements from OpenAI.
OpenAI reported in April that within six weeks of its introduction, its U.S. advertisements experiment generated more than $100 million in annualized income.
The $1 billion annualized revenue run rate indicates that OpenAI is falling considerably short of its $2.5 billion advertising income objective for 2026, according to senior AI analyst Nate Elliott, who called the development “incredibly impressive and terribly disappointing.”
In order to compete in the advertising sector, OpenAI must contend with the supremacy of Alphabet’s Google and Facebook parent Meta, both of which generate hundreds of billions of dollars in ad revenue every year.
OpenAI apparently filed for a U.S. IPO earlier this year, and it is anticipated that the business would go public in 2027 or earlier.
