OpenAI desperately needs the $100 billion advertising revenue that they have projected to investors and others.
From Business Insider, July 21:
OpenAI badly wants a piece of the advertising empires that Google and Meta built, and it has a lot of catch-up to do.
The AI startup began selling ads on its blockbuster ChatGPT product in February, and the ensuing months have brought geographic expansions, added capabilities, and new advertisers onto the platform. Still, ChatGPT's ads business has a long way to go before it rakes in anything like the revenue OpenAI has projected, and customers using ChatGPT for advertising told Business Insider that the product is still rudimentary.
Advertising is becoming a major opportunity for OpenAI. ChatGPT now has around 1 billion monthly users. If OpenAI can grow into a Google- or Meta-sized ad seller, it could rake in billions of dollars and can rely less on business deals than its rival Anthropic does. That will require a long, hard push — and overcoming stark doubts.
OpenAI said in March that its ad business had hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue. In April, the Information and Axios reported that OpenAI was forecasting about $2.4 billion in ads revenue in 2026 and around $100 billion in 2030.
"I don't think there's any chance they hit that goal," said Nate Elliott, an analyst at the data firm EMARKETER.
To hit those numbers, OpenAI would need to dramatically grow its user count, handily beat Google in the consumer AI market, price its ads aggressively, and fill ChatGPT with an "unbearably" high load of ads, Elliott told Business Insider, describing his firm's analysis.
"We look at their numbers and the assumptions required to get there, and we don't see any of those assumptions as logical or reasonable," Elliott said of OpenAI's projections.
EMARKETER predicts that the entire chatbot ads market will make less than $1 billion this year. In comparison, Google generated over $294 billion in ads revenue in 2025....
....MUCH MORE
Here's AdWeek's take:
OpenAI's Ad Business Is on Pace to Miss Its Own Forecast By 90%, Analyst Says
Oddly Business Insider does not disclose that EMARKETER is owned by Insider's parent Axel Springer and had actually been branded "Insider Intelligence" for a few years.
Not sure if it matters or not but it is a strange omission.
