From Friday, the cheapest way to buy an advertisement inside ChatGPT will cost 725 rupees a day, about $7.60. Earlier this year, getting into the same ad manager in the United States required a commitment of $50,000.
On Monday OpenAI announced that ChatGPT Ads had reached a billion dollars in annualized revenue run rate, in under 200 days. Tens of thousands of advertisers now use it, up from around 600 in the pilot's first weeks. The ads run in more than 40 countries.
What changed along the way was who is allowed to buy. OpenAI added cost-per-click pricing, so an advertiser pays only when someone clicks. It dropped the $50,000 floor and opened the self-serve Ads Manager to any American business. In India last week it launched with 50 brands and agency deals with WPP and Omnicom; the self-serve floor there opens Friday at the price of a sandwich. Small and medium businesses, the company says, are now a material share of the ad business.
That is not the whole of it, and the growth rate says so. In April, six weeks after the American pilot began, the business was at a $100 million run rate. It is at ten times that now — and the same India rollout that set a $7.60 floor also brought in two of the largest agency holding companies on earth. That slope looks like more than a long tail of small buyers.
What the run rate does not describe is the other side of the transaction. Against company revenue tracking above $40 billion annualized, advertising is about one fortieth of OpenAI — and the ads themselves appear only for free-tier and Go users, who are the vast majority of roughly a billion weekly ChatGPT users.
Those are the proportions in front of an IPO. OpenAI lost $38.5 billion in 2025 on $13.07 billion of revenue, has filed confidentially to go public, and is being valued privately at $852 billion. In April it told investors to expect about $2.5 billion of advertising revenue this year. A billion-dollar run rate at the end of August is not that.
A run rate is one month's revenue, multiplied by twelve. This one describes a door that now costs $7.60 a day to walk through, and a billion people on the other side of it worth, so far, about a dollar a year each.
A run rate is one month's revenue, multiplied by twelve.
