OpenAI is considering ways to bring in additional revenue, and bringing ads to ChatGPT is one option on the table. While being interviewed on Decoder, ChatGPT head Nick Turley said he’s “humble enough not to rule it out categorically,” but hedged that OpenAI would need to “be very thoughtful and tasteful” about how ads could be integrated into ChatGPT.
“We will build other products, and those other products can have different dimensions to them, and maybe ChatGPT just isn’t an ads-y product because it’s just so deeply accountable to your goals. But it doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t build other things in the future, too,” Turley said. “I think it’s good to preserve optionality, but I also really do want to emphasize how incredible the subscription model is, how fast it’s growing, and how untapped a lot of the opportunities are.”
Bloomberg reported in March that OpenAI is expecting to generate $12.7 billion in revenue this year through subscriptions, more than triple the $3.7 billion in annual revenue it reportedly generated in 2024. The company still burns more money than it makes, however, and isn’t expecting to be cash-flow positive until 2029. Turley says that ChatGPT just surpassed 700 million total users. According to the last figures reported in April, the service has 20 million paid subscribers.
“I actually don’t view the fact that the vast majority of our users are free as necessarily a liability,” Turley said. “I really think it’s a funnel that we can build off of to build differentiated offerings for people who are willing to pay.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has expressed mixed feelings about bringing ads to the company’s flagship chatbot. While at a fireside chat at Harvard Business School last year, Altman said that merging ads with AI is “sort of uniquely unsettling to me” and would be considered a “last resort” for ChatGPT. On the first episode of OpenAI’s podcast in June, however, Altman said he’s “not totally against it.” These considerations come as Elon Musk-owned rival xAI has firmer plans to include ads in Grok’s responses in the future.
Another way OpenAI is looking to build revenue is by taking a cut of product purchases via ChatGPT recommendations. Turley says this is “something we are actively exploring with some of the merchants we’re talking to,” and that the project is called “Commerce in ChatGPT.” Not allowing affiliate revenue to influence ChatGPT product recommendations is a focus for OpenAI, according to Turley.
“All the demos that we have in this space internally make this extremely clear,” Turley said. “I think the magic of ChatGPT is that it independently chooses your products without any interference, and that would be an important thing to preserve.”
For the full interview, go and listen to the latest episode of Decoder.
