OpenAI launched a self-serve Ads Manager for ChatGPT on Monday, open to U.S. advertisers in beta. The system uses cost-per-click bidding, conversion pixels, and a Conversions API. Four major agency holding companies (Omnicom, Publicis, WPP, and Dentsu) signed on as partners alongside Adobe, Criteo, Kargo, Pacvue, and StackAdapt. Sam Altman once called advertising a “last resort.” I guess he’s come around.
OpenAI is projecting north of $25 billion in revenue this year, almost entirely from subscriptions and API fees, and it still won’t be cash-flow positive until at least 2029. It has 900 million weekly active users, but only about 59 million pay (50 million consumer subscribers plus 9 million business users). That’s a conversion rate around 6.5%. When more than 90% of your users are a cost center, you need to find some additional revenue.
The ad product is built around conversational intent. When someone asks ChatGPT “which CRM should I buy for a 50-person sales team,” that query carries a richer commercial signal than an ordinary web search because the user has disclosed budget, team size, and use case in a single exchange. The CPC bidding and conversion tracking let performance marketers measure it the same way they measure everything else. This is ordinary adtech/martech plumbing, and the agencies already know how to use it.
Google, Meta, and Amazon are already all over this. The race to monetize AI conversations is on, and OpenAI enters the market with an attribution infrastructure similar to the one Google spent over two decades building. The privacy stance (no conversation data shared with advertisers, aggregated reporting only) sidesteps the GDPR battles that cost Meta billions. A smart choice, considering how litigious the EU can be.
Consumer online behaviors have evolved over time. Search beat display. For some categories, social retargeting beat search. Conversational AI is the next surface. Nobody knows whether users will tolerate ads inside their AI conversations, and that’s the only question that matters. If they do, Altman’s “last resort” just became a profit center.
Every company needs a Claw strategy. Do you have one?
Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it. This work was created with the assistance of various generative AI models.